Matt > Matt's Quotes

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

“I know the secrets; I dig Joyce and Proust above Melville and Celine.”
― Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody

“The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.”
― Thomas Wolfe

“Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream”
― Jack Kerouac

“Something good will come of all things yet”
― Jack Kerouac

“Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.”
― Thomas Wolfe

“My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“To the heavens on the wings of a pig.”
― John Steinbeck

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.”
― William Faulkner

“As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind.”
― Jack Kerouac

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

“Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.”
― Henry Miller

“Destiny is what you are supposed to do in life. Fate is what kicks you in the ass to make you do it.”
― Henry Miller

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

“I've got my faults, but changing my tune isn't one of them.”
― Samuel Beckett

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”
― Thomas Wolfe, God's Lonely Man

“I don't know yet what I am capable of doing, but, by God, I have genius -- I know it too well to blush behind it. ”
― Thomas Wolfe

“The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.”
― Thomas Wolfe

“I don't care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”
― William S. Burroughs

“My ambition is handicapped by laziness”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

“Pouring out liquor is like burning books.”
― William Faulkner

“Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.”
― William Faulkner

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses