Mehdi > Mehdi's Quotes

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.”
― J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

“The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. ”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.”
― Henry Miller

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

“I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Youth is wasted on the young.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.”
― Norman Mailer

“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”
― Norman Mailer

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“Forever is composed of nows.”
― Emily Dickinson

“I dwell in possibility…”
― Emily Dickinson

“Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
― Thomas Jefferson