John > John's Quotes

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
― David Foster Wallace

“You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking. ”
― David Foster Wallace

“So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

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

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”
― David Foster Wallace

“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

“To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.”
― Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”
― Ernest Hemingway

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles

“All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles

“I feel as if I am an ad
for the sale of a haunted house:

18 rooms
$37,000
I’m yours
ghosts and all.”
― Richard Brautigan

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“What you resist, persists”
― C.G. Jung

“The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”
― C.G. Jung

“The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual becomes.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, The Undiscovered Self

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
― Henry Miller

“What's a fuck when what I want is love?”
― Henry Miller

“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself”
― Henry Miller

“There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.”
― Henry Miller

“I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.”
― Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

“No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.”
― Henry Miller

“To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth—I count that something of a miracle.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Words are loneliness.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”
― Henry Miller