Zak > Zak's Quotes

“There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Canned food is a perversion,' Ignatius said. 'I suspect that it is ultimately very damaging to the soul.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“This time it is real — all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death!”
― John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

“Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me not to rest so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“Hard weather, says the old man. So let it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will wash rain like the stones.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“The stigmatized individual is asked to act so as to imply neither that his burden is heavy nor that bearing it has made him different from us; at the same time he must keep himself at that remove from us which assures our painlessly being able to confirm this belief about him. Put differently, he is advised to reciprocate naturally with an acceptance of himself and us, an acceptance of him that we have not quite extended to him in the first place. A PHANTOM ACCEPTANCE is thus allowed to provide the base for a PHANTOM NORMALCY.”
― Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity

“He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other’s bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love – think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere, behind them!”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man