Ralph Römer > Ralph's Quotes

“Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else.”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“It then becomes necessary to stop short and make a choice: Either/Or. Either one drifts with their absurd system of ideas, believing that this is the human community. Or one dissents totally from their system of ideas and stands as a lonely human being. (But luckily one notices that the others are in the same crisis and making the same choices.)”
― Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System

“He that increaseth wisdom, increaseth sorrow.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“I am not poor, I am not rich; nihil est, nihil deest, I have little, I want nothing: all my treasure is in Minerva’s tower...I live still a collegiate student...and lead a monastic life, ipse mihi theatrum [sufficient entertainment to myself], sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world...aulae vanitatem, fori ambitionem, ridere mecum soleo [I laugh to myself at the vanities of the court, the intrigues of public life], I laugh at all.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Voor het geluk zijn we jammerlijk afhankelijk van onze medemensen - zij kunnen ons naar believen hun liefde en hun zorgen geven of onthouden; het ongeluk kunnen we onszelf altijd, naar eigen goeddunken en met het grootste gemak, toedienen.”
― Patricia De Martelaere, Een verlangen naar ontroostbaarheid: Over leven, kunst en dood

“We go out to be gay. We crave this when once again growing bored with the straight world”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“Sometimes I wish I was a woman, just so I could have an abortion.”
― John Waters