Peter > Peter's Quotes

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  • #1
    Langston Hughes
    “I stay cool, and dig all jive,
    That's the way I stay alive.
    My motto,
    as I live and learn,
    is
    Dig and be dug
    In return.”
    Langston Hughes

  • #2
    Zadie Smith
    “It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy”
    Zadie Smith, On Beauty

  • #3
    Caleb Carr
    “It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and temerity to style themselves "New York Society.”
    Caleb Carr, The Alienist

  • #4
    Thomas Bernhard
    “Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.”
    Thomas Bernhard, Correction

  • #5
    John Hawkes
    “I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.”
    John Hawkes

  • #6
    John Hawkes
    “Need I insist that the only enemy of the mature marriage is monogamy? That anything less than sexual multiplicity...is naive? That our sexual selves are merely idylers in a vast wood?”
    John Hawkes, The Blood Oranges

  • #7
    Albert Camus
    “I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
    Albert Camus

  • #8
    Samuel Beckett
    “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
    Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

  • #9
    Oscar Wilde
    “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
    Oscar Wilde

  • #10
    Mark Twain
    “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
    Mark Twain

  • #11
    Truman Capote
    “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”
    Truman Capote

  • #12
    Aeschylus
    “For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends.”
    Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

  • #13
    William S. Burroughs
    “Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.”
    William Burroughs

  • #14
    “In truth we were quickly reaching--had likely enough already reached--the age where it no longer made sense to talk about "promise." It was around this time that I remarked to Max that no matter what we now achieved no one would say, "He's so young." Precocity had passed us by.
    "After twenty-eight," I sad sadly, "you're judged on your merits."
    "Unless one of us dies," Max corrected me. "Then they'll all say, 'He was so young.”
    Christopher R. Beha, What Happened to Sophie Wilder

  • #15
    “There was something beautiful and timeless to her about a hardback without its jacket, a book that could be known in no way except by reading it.”
    Christopher R. Beha, What Happened to Sophie Wilder
    tags: books

  • #16
    Henry James
    “The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.”
    Henry James

  • #17
    Haruki Murakami
    “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
    Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

  • #18
    Guy de Maupassant
    “Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.”
    Guy de Maupassant

  • #19
    Guy de Maupassant
    “A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.”
    Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques

  • #20
    Guy de Maupassant
    “There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.”
    Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of de Maupassant

  • #21
    Yukio Mishima
    “What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity…”
    Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

  • #22
    William Golding
    “Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.”
    William Golding, Lord of the Flies

  • #23
    William Golding
    “My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.”
    William Golding

  • #24
    William Golding
    “The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.”
    William Golding, Lord of the Flies

  • #25
    Lawrence Durrell
    “Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”
    Lawrence Durrell, Justine

  • #26
    Oscar Wilde
    “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
    Oscar Wilde

  • #27
    Oscar Wilde
    “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
    Oscar Wilde

  • #28
    Oscar Wilde
    “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
    Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

  • #29
    George Bernard Shaw
    “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.”
    George Bernard Shaw

  • #30
    Will Schwalbe
    “One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. ... I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me feel, but I can't feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight.”
    Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club



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