Peter > Peter's Quotes

“De vogel is niet zomaar een gevederde vriend, maar hij is een heraut uit het paradijs.”
― Hans Dorrestijn, Dorrestijns Vogelgids

“Het is absoluut geen verdienste wat dan ook te worden.”
― Marcel Mariën

“I’m sure now’s the time in my life to be doing a lot of things I’m not doing. I feel bad about that. But even worse is knowing that when i’m eighty-four I’ll look back on where I am now and think: those were the days.”
― Ariel Leve, It Could Be Worse, You Could Be Me

“Complaining is a lot like talking, only more constructive.”
― Ariel Leve, It Could Be Worse, You Could Be Me

“The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, 'You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”
― George Carlin

“His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“...I doubt very seriously whether anyone will hire me.'

What do you mean, babe? You a fine boy with a good education.'

Employers sense in me a denial of their values.' He rolled over onto his back. 'They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century I loathe. This was true even when I worked for the New Orleans Public Library.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today's employer is seeking. ”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“employers sense in me a denial of their values...they fear me. i suspect that they can see that i am forced to function in a century which i loathe.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge. . . . New Orleans is, on the other hand, a comfortable metropolis which has a certain apathy and stagnation which I find inoffensive.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Perhaps I should have been a Negro. I suspect I would have been a rather large and terrifying one, continually pressing my ample thigh against the withered thighs of old white ladies in public conveyances a great deal and eliciting more than one shriek of panic. Then, too, if I were a Negro, I would not be pressured by my mother to find a good job, for no good jobs would be available. My mother herself, a worn old Negress, would be too broken by years of underpaid labor as a domestic to go out bowling at night. She and I could live most pleasantly in some moldy shack in the slums in a state of ambitionless peace, realizing contentedly that we were unwanted, that striving was meaningless.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“The lesson for this Round, as we shall hear time and again, is that each generation inhabits a different acoustic universe, constituted by different musics and memories of sound, by different thicknesses of walls and densities of traffic, by different means of manufacture and broadcast, by different diets and ear-damaging diseases, by different proportions and preponderances of metal rattling in kitchens, clanging on the streets, or ringing in the ( differently polluted) air above.”
― Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible”
― William S. Burroughs

“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
― Noam Chomsky

“I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

“Reader's Bill of Rights

1. The right to not read

2. The right to skip pages

3. The right to not finish

4. The right to reread

5. The right to read anything

6. The right to escapism

7. The right to read anywhere

8. The right to browse

9. The right to read out loud

10. The right to not defend your tastes”
― Daniel Pennac

“I know
you and I
are not about poems or
other sentimental bullshit
but I have to tell you
even the way
you drink your coffee
knocks me the fuck out.”
― Clementine von Radics

“Uw brief uit Siwa viel op mijn grauwe leven neer, als een rozeblaadje op het oppervlak van een troebele beek.”
― Iwam Toergenjew

“Don't go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines.”
― Jerry Saltz

“Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interests of human reason. Business can't. Diplomacy won't. It has to be people like us.”
― Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana

“They say it is possible to see stars from the bottom of a well when the sun is shining.”
― Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana

“To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be.”
― Thomas Ligotti