flowsthead > flowsthead's Quotes

“A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically—to those who hardly think about us in return.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.”
― Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

“Let's go together. Even though this path may be harder and even though it might be more painful for you.”
― SIU, Tower of God #1

“‎...nothing offends a man of our time and tribe more than to be told that he's unoriginal, weak of character, with no special talents, and an ordinary man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

“After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

“Ours is the ability, the need, to gainsay or ‘un-say’ the world, to image and speak it otherwise. In that capacity in its biological and social evolution, may lie some of the clues to the question of the origins of human speech and the multiplicity of tongues. It is not, perhaps, ‘a theory of information’ that will serve us best in trying to clarify the nature of language, but a ‘theory of misinformation’.”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

“Literature is the fragment of fragments’, wrote Goethe in Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering, the great sad novel of his old age: ‘the least part of all that ever happened and was spoken was written down, and of what was written only the least part has survived . . .’.”
― Franco Moretti, Distant Reading

“If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”
― Sun Tzu

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more. And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have.”
― John Steinbeck, The Pearl

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“He knitted a good deal, he would tell you if you asked him, to keep himself from smoking, adding that he also smoked a good deal to keep himself from knitting.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Cocktail Time

“When some one reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, he said, "And I sentenced them to stay at home.”
― Diogenes

“Taking a close look at - at what's around us there - there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of... overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle - Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban... novel... a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication... overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the - the stars up here in the - in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.”
― Werner Herzog, Burden of Dreams

“Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.”
― Werner Herzog

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”
― Zhuangzi, The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang Tzu

“Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”
― Joe Haldeman

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“Life is too short and love is too long.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

“Harrowhark said, in the exact sepulchral tones of Marshal Crux: “Death first to vultures and scavengers.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“Fuck one flesh, one end, Harrow. I already gave my flesh to you, and I already gave you my end. I gave you my sword. I gave you myself. I did it while knowing I’d do it all again, without hesitation, because all I ever wanted you to do was eat me.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“You hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I’d had your full attention.”
― Tamsyn Muir

“All I want is a nice girlfriend in a cottage where we have philosophical conversations over scones or something.”
― Casey McQuiston, I Kissed Shara Wheeler

“I don’t believe doing something in front of everybody makes it more meaningful, anyway. If anything, it makes it stop belonging to you.”
― Casey McQuiston, I Kissed Shara Wheeler