Jonathan > Jonathan's Quotes

“All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world , individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. (Wakefield)”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers."

(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“But no one came. Because no one ever does.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale

“Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Well -- I'm an outsider to the end of my days!”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“His father had a dream: to keep his hands forever clean. Joey wasn't clear whether his father had ever understood that it takes a lot of digging in the dirt to do that.”
― William H. Gass, Middle C

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince