Rae > Rae's Quotes

“...of all things this was the saddest, that life goes on: if one leaves one's lover, life should stop for him, and if one disappears from the world, then the world should stop, too: and it never did. And that was the real reason for most people getting up in the morning: not because it would matter but because it wouldn't.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“To live (as I understand it) is to exist within a conception of time.

But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time.

Every memory, no matter how remote its subject, takes place 'Now,' at the moment it's called to the mind.

The more something is recalled, the more the brain has a chance to refine the original experience.

Because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.”
― David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp

“It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.”
― D.W. Winnicott

“I must tell you that I should really like to think there's something wrong with me- Because, if there isn't, then there's something wrong with the world itself-and that's much more frightening! That would be terrible. So I'd rather believe there is something wrong with me, that could be put right.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

“I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
― Horace Mann

“Virtue? A fig! 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.”
― William Shakespeare, Othello

“Time eventually convinces most of us that forgiveness is a virtue. Conveniently, cowardice and forgiveness look identical at a certain distance.”
― Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori

“Simply to acquiesce in skepticism can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason.”
― Immanuel Kant

“I must fling myself down and writhe; I must strive with every piece of force I possess; I bruise and batter myself against the floor, the walls; I strain and sob and exhaust myself, and begin again, and exhaust myself again; but do I feel pain? Never. How can I feel pain? There is no place for it.”
― Harry Houdini

“The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly”
― andre breton

“The trick is in not minding.”
― G. Gordon Liddy

“One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.

In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying “yes” begins things. Saying “yes” is how things grow. Saying “yes” leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say “yes'.”
― Stephen Colbert

“Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”
― Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, A Life For A Life

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“…It's as if they actually think that what other people think of them somehow doesn't matter. I mean, I know we're all supposed to believe that, but obviously, none of us actually do. And nor should we, because it does! It does matter! And the people who genuinely believe it doesn't tend to be the very people who ought to care most what other people think of them, because what the other people are thinking is, 'No, actually, I don't think the Chinese are "up to something,"' or, 'You should use mouthwash,' or, 'Your mania for the collective socialization of agriculture will surely cause the deaths of millions,' or, 'Forty cats is too many cats.”
― David Mitchell

“Shall each man," cried he, "find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man! You may hate, but beware! Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness forever. Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains—revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be.”
― Thomas Paine

“If I had feelings, I probably wouldn’t have even survived.”
― Richard Nixon

“Surrender? I have not yet begun to fight!”
― John Paul Jones, Memoirs Of Rear-admiral John Paul Jones

“I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Have you felt it too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you- except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them; nothing, not even a sound they can recognize.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes; if the prospect of his or her own future pleasure or happiness cannot for reasons which I have suggested provide criteria for solving the problems of action in the case of each individual, it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that.”
― Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup.

As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“He desired her vaguely but without conviction. They walked together. He suddenly realized that she had always been very decent to him. She had accepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness. He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love -- first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage. Today he understood that she had been genuine with him -- that she had been what she was, and that he owed her a good deal.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote