Trish > Trish's Quotes

“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

“Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives... and to the "good life", whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman

“Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.”
― Paul Terry

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience

“Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, Harry. Except in America, rejoined Lord Henry, languidly.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I suppose in about fortnight we shall be told that he has been seen in San Francisco. It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.”
― Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World

“The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.”
― Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World

“You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”
― oscar wilde

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“He would have denied it, even to himself -deemed it a laughable affectation- but it seemed to him now that he had always secretly believed that in the way he lived (he refused to say his "lifestyle"), in his freelance, un-health-insured, sparsely thinged life, he was in a small way registering a rejection-of conformity, of middle-class convention, of not just acquisitiveness but enslavement to the idol of "security." Nevertheless, he'd wound up in the same place as everyone else. Was this - latte liberalism - his inescapable fate? Surely it was. It was sheer vanity to pretend otherwise.”
― Adelle Waldman, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.