Vicky > Vicky's Quotes

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“...I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made...”
― William Butler Yeats

“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire, 5-Book Boxed Set: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, A Dance with Dragons

“It was... the Great White God de-throned, I suppose. Because we did, we quite unselfconsciously assumed we were the measure of all things. That was how we approached them. And suddenly I saw that we weren't the measure of all things, but that there was no measure.”
― Pat Barker, Regeneration

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“If only my heart were stone.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.”
― Pat Barker, Regeneration

“A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.”
― Pat Barker, Regeneration

“Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Where men can't live gods fare no better.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Science is magic that works.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Let there be nothing harmonious about our children's playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old time big brains. They would tell their owners, in effect, 'Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course, it's just fun to think about.'

And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it-have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people to death in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in indistrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing.
In the water I am beautiful. ”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House

“I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“People, feelings, everything! Double! Two people in each person. There's also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray