Laura Lee > Laura's Quotes

“I do believe you have a wound too. I do believe it is both specific to you and common to everyone. I do believe it is the thing about you that must be hidden and protected, it is the thing that must be tap danced over five shows a day, it is the thing that won’t be interesting to other people if revealed. It is the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself. But it is the thing that wants to live. It is the thing from which your art, your painting, your dance, your composition, your philosophical treatise, your screenplay is born.”
― Charlie Kaufman

“...have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked in rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it live your way to the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“To pay for my father's funeral I borrowed money from people he already owed money to. One called him a nobody. No, I said, he was a failure. You can't remember a nobody's name, that's why they're called nobodies. Failures are unforgettable.”
― Philip Schultz, Failure

“Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.”
― Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

“It may be extremely dreary for a woman to wait for a lover who never comes; for a common soldier to wait for epaulettes which are never given him; or for a middle aged prince to sigh each morning because an abnormally healthy mother is keeping him from the throne to which he aspires: but the thing which is drearier than either of these is for an author to watch for book notices which are never printed.”
― Lew Vanderpoole

“If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame. It will be to each man what he is himself. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is easy to forgive the innocent. It is the guilty who test our morality. People are more than the worst thing they have ever done.”
― Helen Prejean

“Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.”
― Madeline L'Engle

“Telling one's friends to buy a book is a waste of time. One has to produce it from one's pocket and press it into their hands. The least one can hope for is that they'll leave it lying about in their drawing-rooms and talk as though they'd read it.”
― Robert Baldwin Ross

“I wanted to do something that I don’t know how to do, and offer you the experience of watching someone fumble, because I think maybe that’s what art should offer. An opportunity to recognise our common humanity and vulnerability.”
― Charlie Kaufman

“Those who slander others,' Sachish said, 'do so because they love slander, not because they love truth. It's pointless therefore to struggle to prove that a piece of slander is untrue.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“Surely a gentleman has a right to fail if he chooses.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Our emphasis on saving makes sense when we consider that most of us think of our options as either saving or spending. But the biblical witness and Christian tradition suggest that there's another option: sharing.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“I came to realize that there was no power capable of changing the image of my person lodged somewhere in the supreme court of human destinies; that this image (even though it bore no resemblance to me) was much more real than my actual self; that I was its shadow and not it mine; that I had no right to accuse it of bearing no resemblance to me, but rather that it was I who was guilty of the non-resemblance; and that the non-resemblance was my cross, which I could not unload on anyone else, which was mine alone to bear.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“Both personal experience and professional studies of social processes, after all, had led me to think that people rarely accomplish exactly what they consciously plan, and constantly find events unrolling differently from what they anticipated. Why, then, do people's descriptions and explanations of social processes overwhelmingly emphasize conscious deliberation?”
― Charles Tilly, Why?

“Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work...Give that to the world, rather than selling something to the world. Don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work and that in the end selling is what everyone must do. Try not to.”
― Charlie Kaufman

“Civilization proceeds in a direction opposite from everything mountains represent: starvation, hardship, coldness, the constant scramble to survive...People used to avoid mountains, but now we seek their company. We come for the pretty sights, but also to find a place still free from those life-saving constraints. We come to the mountain seeking beauty and terror.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“If our statesmen agree more in private, it is for the very simple reason that they agree more in public. And the reason they agree so much in both cases is really that they belong to one social class; and therefore the dining life is the real life. Tory and Liberal statesmen like each other, but it is not because they are both expansive; it is because they are both exclusive.”
― G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered

“In any society built on institutionalized racism, race mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race mixing proves that races can mix, and in a lot of cases want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“This is how I think of Mount Rainier, not as an icon of permanence but as a source of relentless change, a mountain forever falling.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“We must try harder to understand than to explain.”
― Václav Havel

“And no, it wasn’t shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it; too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along...”
― W. H. Auden

“Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don't work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck's book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man's stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“Our capacity for calm ultimately depends on our levels of expectation: if we suppose that most things normally turn out to be slightly disappointing (but that this is OK); that change occurs slowly (but that life is long); that most people are neither terribly good nor very wicked (and this includes us); that humanity has faced crisis after crisis (yet muddled through) – if we are able to keep these entirely obvious but highly fugitive thoughts alive in our minds, then we stand to be less easily seduced into panic.”
― Alain de Botton, The News: A User's Manual

“As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Art is not a pastime, but a priesthood.”
― Jean Cocteau

“It’s weird to be a human. We get to think about things, we get to wonder. It seems like quite a privileged position in the universe. And I wouldn’t give it up for certainty because when you’re certain you stop being curious. And here’s the one thing I know about the thing you’re certain about; you’re wrong.”
― Charlie Kaufman

“Men always attempt to avoid condemning a thing upon merely moral grounds. If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact that it is wrong.”
― G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered