Tash > Tash's Quotes

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.”
― James Baldwin

“In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a native son

“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him. The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

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

“yelling,”
― Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic

“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“It does not matter that you do not understand the reason. You are the Beloved Child of the House. Be comforted.
And I am comforted.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“(...) even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology

“For example, my name is Abigail and people call me Abby very easily and it does this thing to me where I like them right away. Makes me feel like I know them already and that they like me already. That we’re close and I can trust them. Like, even if I were speaking to some prisoner through thick glass, a giant villain with a million face tattoos and a big scar from the corner of his mouth to his ear, if he called me Abby, I might smuggle something in my vagina for him next time I visited, keep him liking me because now that I’ve got him liking me, he’s not so bad. Now that I’ve got him liking me, I need it to live.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia