Dec > Dec's Quotes

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“The air of Paris is quite different from any other. There's something about it which thrills and excites and intoxicates you, and in some strange way makes you want to dance and do all sorts of other silly things. As soon as I get out of the train, it's just as if I had drunk a bottle of champagne. What a time one could have surrounded by artists! How happy those lucky people must be, the great men who have made a name in a city like Paris! What a wonderful life they have!”
― Guy de Maupassant, Boule de Suif

“The townsfolk in their darkened rooms were dazed as if by some cataclysm, some devastating earthquake, against which all wisdom and all resistance is of no avail. Such a feeling is produced every time the established order of things is upset, when security is destroyed and everything is hitherto protected by the laws of man or nature is suddenly at the mercy of wild unreasoning brutality.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Boule de Suif

“Will anyone understand it outside Paris? That is open to doubt. The special features of this scene, full of local colour and observations, can only be appreciated in the area lying between the heights of Montmartre and the hills of Montrouge, in that illustrious valley of flaking plasterwork and gutters black with mud; a valley full of suffering that is real, and of joy that is often false, where life is so hectic that it takes something quite extraordinary to produce feelings that last.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Amen.So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“She was pretty and, even more, she was smart, and she had a divine figure according to all accounts. He fell in love with her, as a man always falls in love with any attractive woman whom he sees a lot of.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Boule de Suif

“To breathe Paris is to preserve one's soul.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I'm killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.”
― Bill Watterson

“I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.”
― Bill Watterson

“A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.”
― Bill Watterson, There's Treasure Everywhere

“How intense can be the longing to escape from the emptiness and dullness of human verbosity, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labour, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince

“So whether he calls it spirit music or not, I don't care. He took it out of wind off mid-Atlantic.”
― Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground

“Weeks went by, then months. I am speaking of a far-away time - a vanished happiness. It fell to me to befriend, to console with whatever words I could find, one who had been the fairy, the princess, the mysterious love-dream of our adolescence - and it fell to me because my companion had fled. Of that period ... what can I say? I've kept a single image of that time, and it is already fading: the image of a lovely face grown thin and of two eyes whose lids slowly droop as they glance at me, as if her gaze was unable to dwell on anything but an inner world.”
― Henri Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes

“This evening, which I have tried to spirit away, is a strange burden to me. While time moves on, while the day will soon end and I already wish it gone, there are men who have entrusted all their hopes to it, all their love and their last efforts. There are dying men or others who are waiting for a debt to come due, who wish that tomorrow would never come. There are others for whom the day will break like a pang of remorse; and others who are tired, for whom the night will never be long enough to give them the rest that they need. And I - who have lost my day - what right do I have to wish that tomorrow comes?”
― Henri Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes

“Je pensais de meme que notre jeunesse etait finie et le bonheur manqué.

I thought too that our youth was over and we had failed to find happiness.”
― Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes

“The first difference Newt noticed about being grown up was that time didn't pass as slow.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“Rain fell more steadily now. Grey and unrelenting. Nobody seemed to notice. Rain on the puddles. Rain on the high brickwork. Rain on the slate roofs. Rain on the rain itself.”
― Colum McCann, TransAtlantic

“So a contemporary wedding is like the Olympic Games, a spectacle of detailed research and preparation but lasts only a short time. Even if it all goes according to plan, a wedding is over in a day, much of it spent being ordered around by photographers, and when the audience is gone and the costumes returned to their boxes (never again to be taken out), an ordinary man and woman look to each other and think: 'Is this all it is?”
― michael foley, The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life makes it Hard to be Happy

“Well, maybe it's true,' Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. 'Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?'
'I do,' Dunbar told him.
'Why?' Clevinger asked.
'What else is there?”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“He mentioned Beethoven. She had read in the library about that musician - his name was pronounced with an a and spelled with a double e. He was a German fellow like Mozart. When he was living he spoke in a foreign language and lived in a foreign place - like she wanted to do.”
― Carson McCullers

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984