Bagus > Bagus's Quotes

“That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“They know where happiness lies, not in a cave or a country, but in love and the freedom to give and take what has been there all along.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“Dementia was like a truth serum.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.”
― Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris: The Shooting Script

“Isn't hate merely the result of wounded love?”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“ You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash?
But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. and what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. this may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
”
― Julian Barnes

“When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“At times, I suspect that the concept of maturity is maintained by a conspiracy of niceness.”
― Julian Barnes, Metroland

“Until I met Annick I’d always been certain that the edgy cynicism and disbelief in which I dealt, plus a cowed trust in the word of any imaginative writer, were the only tools for the painful, wrenching extraction of truths from the surrounding quartz of hypocrisy and deceit. The pursuit of truth had always seemed something combative. Now, not exactly in a flash, but over a few weeks, I wondered if it weren’t something both higher – above the supposed conflict – and simpler, attainable not through striving but a simple inward glance.”
― Julian Barnes, Metroland

“Why does anything left-wing have to be trendy before it’s read, and by the time it’s trendy it’s already a force for conservatism?”
― Julian Barnes, Metroland

“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

“Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the possibility of love dying.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“I can’t say what made me fall in love with Vietnam - that a woman’s voice can drug you; that everything is so intense. The colors, the taste, even the rain. Nothing like the filthy rain in London. They say whatever you’re looking for, you will find here. They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived. The smell: that’s the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange for your soul. And the heat. Your shirt is straightaway a rag. You can hardly remember your name, or what you came to escape from. But at night, there’s a breeze. The river is beautiful. You could be forgiven for thinking there was no war; that the gunshots were fireworks; that only pleasure matters. A pipe of opium, or the touch of a girl who might tell you she loves you. And then, something happens, as you knew it would. And nothing can ever be the same again.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“Death was far more certain than God.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“They don't believe in anything either. You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested."
"They don't want communism."
"They want enough rice," I said. "They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want."
"If Indochina goes--"
"I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does 'go' mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying their produce to market on long poles, wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don't like our smell, the smell of Europeans.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“Sadness alone can’t harm anyone. It’s what you do when you’re sad that can hurt you and those around you.”
― Clarissa Goenawan, Rainbirds

“Love comes when you least expect it. That's why people call it falling in love. You cannot learn to fall, nor do you ever plan to. You just happen to fall.”
― Clarissa Goenawan

“When you ask too much of others, of course people will start to fail you.”
― Clarissa Goenawan, Rainbirds

“I had no idea why I was being so patronising. Perhaps I couldn't believe true love existed at our age. Our classmates who claimed to be in love were mistaking excitement and fuzzy feelings for love.”
― Clarissa Goenawan, Rainbirds