Philip > Philip's Quotes

“Friends come and go but I wouldn't have thought you'd be one of them”
― Dorothy Parker

“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”
― Truman Capote, Answered Prayers

“Why are old lovers able to become friends? Two reasons. They never truly loved each other, or they love each other still.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“the world is not a pleasant place to be without someone to hold and be held by.”
― Nikki Giovanni

“A friend is one who walks in when others walk out.”
― Walter Winchell

“Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

“Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.”
― David Sedaris

“We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.”
― David Sedaris, Naked

“Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit. I myself was confounded as shit...”
― David Sedaris

“That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say 'No' in any of them.”
― Dorothy Parker, While Rome Burns

“I won't telephone him. I'll never telephone him again as long as I live. He'll rot in hell, before I'll call him up. You don't have to give me strength, God; I have it myself. If he wanted me, he could get me. He knows where I am. He knows I'm waiting here. He's so sure of me, so sure. I wonder why they hate you, as soon as they are sure of you.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“I require three things in a man: he must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.”
― Dorothy Parker

“She was pleased to have him come and never sorry to see him go.”
― Dorothy Parker

“To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."

[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]”
― David McCullough

“Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.”
― David McCullough

“Watching him was like opening the door to a siniging telegram; you know it's supposed to be entertaining, but you can't get beyond the sad fact that this person actually thinks he bringing some joy into your life. Somewhere he had a mother who sifted through a shoe box of mimeographed playbills, pouring herself another drink and wondering when her son would come to his senses and swallow some drain cleaner.”
― David Sedaris, Naked

“If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.”
― Dorothy Parker, While Rome Burns

“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
― Dorothy Parker

“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”
― Joan Powers, Pooh's Little Instruction Book

“The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain — the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed — then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature

“Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.”
― Vladimir Nabokov