Oscar Lazo > Oscar's Quotes

“In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee:

“Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight.”

It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability - a most singular case, I presume - of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Q: What is the best thing men do? A: To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977

“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“Music is ... A higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.”
― Paul McCartney

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
― Albert Einstein, The World As I See It

“Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”
― Niels Bohr, Essays 1932-1957 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. 2)

“Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise - a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames - but still a paradise.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

“I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A good friend will always stab you in the front.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Faith makes all things possible. Love makes them easy.”
― Dwight L. Moody

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Music is like a dream. One that I cannot hear.”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose

“We are most nearly ourselves when we achieve the seriousness of the child at play.”
― Heraclitus

“Man's character is his fate.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments