Marie > Marie's Quotes

“Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“The second god lived by mountains that flowed
By the blue shiny lit roads
Had forgot what others still tried to grasp”
― Mark E. Smith

“If you're going to play it out of tune, then play it out of tune properly.”
― Mark E. Smith, Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

“I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

[Thoughts on Various Subjects]”
― Jonathan Swift , Abolishing Christianity and Other Essays

“Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“The great appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!”
― James Larkin

“is it not a duty to the survivors that we should refrain from augmenting their unhappiness by an appearance of immoderate grief? It is also a duty owed to yourself; for excessive sorrow prevents improvement or enjoyment, or even the discharge of daily usefulness, without which no man is fit for society.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Nyasha knew nothing about leaving. She had only been taken to places - to the mission, to England, back to the mission. She did not know what essential parts of you stayed behind no matter how violently you tried to dislodge them in order to take them with you.”
― Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

“It’s bad enough . . . when a country gets colonized, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end.”
― Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

“But she never finds any servant or any friend who can do these simple things ‘properly’—because her ‘properly’ conceals an insatiable demand for the exact, and almost impossible, palatal pleasures which she imagines she remembers from the past; a past described by her as ‘the days when you could get good servants’ but known to us as the days when her senses were more easily pleased and she had pleasures of other kinds which made her less dependent on those of the table.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“You know what? I really resent the idea that the only reason someone might be good or moral is because they’re religious. I do what I do,’ Anne said, biting off each word, ‘without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require heaven or hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently, thank you very much.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“It was as if he had lived all of his twenty-six years within an artificially narrow bandwidth of his potential personhood, only to have the scales fall abruptly from his eyes.”
― Justin Cronin, The Twelve

“I am sixty-nine,’ he said. ‘Everything I know of life I know at second hand. Sometimes that is very bitter to me. And yet, because of it, I know a good deal.”
― Agatha Christie, The Complete Quin and Satterthwaite

“Mr Satterthwaite clucked twice in vexation. Whether right in his assumption or not, he was more and more convinced that cars nowadays broke down far more frequently than they used to do.”
― Agatha Christie, The Complete Quin and Satterthwaite