Emily Hughes > Emily's Quotes

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

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin

“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“Hate is a lack of imagination.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding. ”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“Now I lay me down to sleep my bomb proof cellar's good and deep but if I'm killed before I wake remember god it's for your sake amen.”
― Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

“Riches seem to come to the poor in spirit, the poor in interest and joy. To put it straight - the very rich are a poor bunch of bastards”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
― Franz Kafka

“When one man says, “No, I won’t,” Rome begins to fear.”
― Dalton Trumbo

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
― Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
― Albert Camus

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”
― Anais Nin

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.”
― Vaclav Havel

“Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.”
― Friedrich Neitzsche

“Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art

Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art

Not many have style
Not many can keep style
I have seen dogs with more style than men,
although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.

When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun,
that was style.
Or sometimes people give you style
Joan of Arc had style
John the Baptist
Jesus
Socrates
Caesar
García Lorca.

I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.
Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,
or you, naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I'm a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything, I feel it though I do not see it..whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever dying there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves and recreates.. .in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists.”
― Mahatma Gandhi