RBick > RBick's Quotes

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“youth is a marvelous garment”
― Iris Murdoch, The Bell

“I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not achieve for others the good that we intend but achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves - and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it. But this should not make us draw back. God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Bell

“Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little often share.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure.
I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London