Robert > Robert's Quotes

“living only for the moment, savouring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking wine, and diverting oneself in simply floating, unconcerned by the prospect of imminent poverty, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the current of the river...”
― Asai Ryoi, Tales of the Floating World

“Hope is a slighter, tougher thing even than trust, he thought, pacing his room as the soundless, vague lightning flashed overhead. In a good season one trusts life; in a bad season one only hopes, But they are of the same essence: they are the mind's indispensable relationship with other minds, with the world, and with time. Without trust, a man lives, but not a human life; without hope, he dies. When there is no relationship, where hands do not touch, emotion atrophies in void and intelligence goes sterile and obsessed. Between men the only link left is that of owner to slave, or murderer to victim.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions

“Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.”
― Shusaku Endo, Silence

“All individual and social woes are born of
passion for work.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“You can never really trust someone who remembers every embarrassing detail of your adolescence.”
― Daniel Clowes, David Boring

“Under the ancien régime, the laws of the Church guaranteed workers ninety days of rest (fifty-two Sundays and thirty-eight public holidays), during which they were strictly prohibited from working. This was the great crime of Catholicism and the principle cause of irreligion among the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie.... Protestantism, which is the Christian religion adapted to the new industrial and commercial needs of the bourgeoisie, was less concerned with days of rest for the people. It banished the saints from heaven in order to do away with their feast days on earth.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

“Indeed, these people are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.”
― Acts 2:15

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“God! what would I forfeit to have the days of my childhood restored, or to be able to forget them for ever!”
― Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

“You'll have to forgive me. I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it. Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain those distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep. Weeping is what it is, not crying. I sit in this chair and ooze like a sponge.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

“I swear it's easier to purge yourself of great errors than of little villainies.”
― Marek Hłasko, The Eighth Day of the Week

“Everything man does, he does out of longing for a better life. Or out of a sense of moral protest.”
― Marek Hłasko, The Eighth Day of the Week

“But I don't like light. I like the darkness, which frees us from our faces and the shadows we cast.”
― Marek Hłasko, Killing the Second Dog

“Robert, art isn't made by people working in twos or threes. Art is made by loners. That's why I used to like literature, because in literature the only ones who count for something are those who go it alone, never expecting anyone to come along one day and explain what they're really striving to achieve.”
― Marek Hłasko, Killing the Second Dog

“Uncertainty is not chaos but rather the necessary habitat of the present tense. We choose the fallibility of shared promises and problem solving over the certain tyranny imposed by a dominant power or plan because this is the price we pay for freedom to will, which founds our right to the future tense. In the absence of this freedom, the future collapses into an infinite present of mere behavior, in which there can be no subjects and no projects: only objects.”
― Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

“There is a problem with writers. If what a writer wrote was published and sold many, many copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold a medium number of copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold very few copies, the writer thought he was great. If what the writer wrote never was published and he didn't have enough the money to publish it himself, then he thought he was truly great. The truth, however, was there was very little greatness. It was almost nonexistent, invisible. But you could be sure that the worst writers had the most confidence, the least self-doubt. Anyway, writers were to be avoided, and I tried to avoid them, but it was almost impossible. They hoped for some sort of brotherhood, some kind of togetherness. None of it had anything to do with writing, none of it helped at the typewriter.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women