John > John's Quotes

“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― Carl Jung

“The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.”
― George Sand

“I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.”
― John Cheever

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.”
― Thomas Mann

“He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.”
― Thomas Mann

“What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.”
― Thomas Wolfe

“There is a sacredness in tears....They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.”
― Washington Irving

“Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Hunger is the best sauce in the world.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“He certainly seemed to have all the qualities of a gentleman, but the interesting kind who knows exactly when to stop behaving like one.”
― Michael Dibdin, Medusa

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

“He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.”
― Epictetus