Bobby > Bobby's Quotes

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
― Lord Byron

“And so it goes...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“My memories are like coins in the devil's purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain but when one has it there's no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in the mood to go out. No, don't worry, they'll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful. As for suicide, they would be more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them. May heaven protect us, cher Monsieur, from being set upon a pedestal by our friends!”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, The Wall and Other Stories

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“Good night. What? Those ladies behind those windows? Dream, monsieur, cheap dream, a trip to the Indies! Those persons perfume themselves with spices. You go in, they draw the curtains, and the navigation begins. The gods come down onto the naked bodies and the islands are set adrift, lost souls crowned with the tousled hair of palm trees in the wind. Try it.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“A natural balcony fifteen hundred feet above a sea still visible bathed in sunlight, on the other hand, was the place where I could breathe most freely, especially if I were alone, well above the human ants.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“Somebody has to have the last word. Otherwise, every reason can be answered with another one and there would never be an end to it. Power, on the other hand, settles everything…We no longer say as in simple times: “This is the way I think. What are your objections?” We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have substituted the communique: “This is the truth,” we say. “You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren't interested.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“Ah, mon cher, we are odd, wretched creatures, and if we merely look back over our lives, there’s no lack of occasions to amaze and horrify ourselves. Just try.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“The news did not trouble her particularly; all news was bad, like wage demands, strikes, or war, and the wise person paid no attention to it.”
― Neil Shute, On the Beach

“It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“I would like you to clear up for me just what the hell your motives are for saying it.' He hesitated, but not long enough to give Franny a chance to cut in on him. 'As a matter of simple logic, there's no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who's greedy for material treasure—or even intellectual treasure—and the man who's greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure's treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“We have so much difficulty imagining nothingness.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrased and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"

"I give."

"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I do not think, therefore I am a moustache”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Though everything will seem dark to you now, remember that even behind the darkest clouds of night there shines the moon of dawn.”
― Robert van Gulik, Judge Dee at Work: Eight Chinese Detective Stories

“Free love is vibrator slogan.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve

“The world is so vast, but still everyone looks up at the same moon”
― Fu Shen, Six Records of a Floating Life

“The rich died, too, disappointing all those who thought that somehow they didn't. Peter Lakes had no illusions about mortality. He knew that it made everyone perfectly equal, and that the treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter, and love. The wealthy could not buy these things. On the contrary they were for the taking.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“I like the race, rather than the winning.
Do you really?
Yes, I've imagined great victories, and I've imagined great races. The races are better.”
― Mark Helprin

“Whatever is, is, and whatever is not, is not”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“They danced on the shore in marvelous, civilized, humorous reels in which the old contributed wit when they could not contribute grace, and the young listened to their elders, who told them in their dancing to hold on, to love, to be patient, and most of all, to trust.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“My father told us stories about our ancestors and about the city and how we should act. He told us that the four sins are wine, women, wealth, and wrath.”
― Ida Pruitt, A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman