Laura > Laura's Quotes

“I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch for. It is, I believe, too little yielding— certainly too little for the convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of other so soon as I ought, nor their offenses against myself. My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost, is lost forever.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“I was modest--they accused me of being crafty: I became secretive. I felt deeply good and evil--nobody caressed me, everybody offended me: I became rancorous. I was gloomy--other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them--but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world--none understood me: and I learned to hate.”
― Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

“My anger subsides, I'd like to pee.”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“Right," I said, but it didn't feel very right. I didn't want to make it. I wanted to lie down with it and strangle it and kill it and save it and nurse it and kill it again and I wanted to go and forget where I was going and I wanted to change my name and forget my face and I wanted to drink and get my head ruined but I certainly hadn't thought about making it. That wasn't anything I'd ever sought out to do.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, McGlue

“Noir: all those beautiful sentences telling you the most terrible things.”
― Robert Polito

“I have been so long master
that I would be master still, or at least that none other
should be master of me.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“Next to music, beer was best.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“I've got plenty of courage, as much as you! ... Only, if you want the whole truth ... everything, absolutely everything! disgusts me and turns my stomach!

Not just you! ... Everything! ... And love most of all! ... Yours as much as anyone else's! ... The sentimental tripe you dish out ... Want me to tell you what I think of it? I think it's like making love in the crapper! Do you get me now? ... All the sentiment you trot out to make me stick with you hits me like an insult, if you want to know ... And to make it worse, you don't even realize it, you're the one that's rotten because you don't understand! ... You're satisfied repeating the rubbish other people say ... You think it makes sense ... People have told you there's nothing better than love, they've told you it'll go down with everybody, everywhere and always, and that's good enough for you ... Well, I say fuck their love! ... You hear? ... Their putrid love doesn't go down with me ... not anymore! ... You've missed the train! You're too late! It won't go down anymore, and that's that! ... What a stupid thing to get steamed up about! ... Why do you have to make love, considering all the things that are happening? ... All the things we see around us! ... Or are you blind? ... More likely you just don't give a damn! You wallow in sentiment when you're a worse brute than anybody ... You want to eat rotten meat? ... With love sauce? ... Does that help it down? ... Not with me!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've felt suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt awful -- awful beyond all -- but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude. It's being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I'll quote Ibsen, "The strongest men are the most alone." I've never thought, "Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I'll feel good." No, that won't help. You know the typical crowd, "Wow, it's Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?" Well, yeah. Because there's nothing out there. It's stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I've never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories. That's all. Sorry for all the millions, but I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have. Let's drink more wine!”
― Charles Bukowski

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”
― P.G. Wodehouse , The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology

“I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let's say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it. Of course I can't explain to you just whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "get even" with the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself and no one else. But still, if I don't treat it, its is out of spite. My liver is bad, well then-- let it get even worse!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Even a fool learns something once it hits him.”
― Homer, Iliad

“The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves!

“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?'"
"The mood will pass, sir.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

“I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.
Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“What a world, what a world. Who would have thought that. some little girl like you could. destroy my beautiful wickedness.
- Wicket Witch of the West”
― Noel Langley, The Wizard of Oz Screenplay

“So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”
― Aristotle

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”
― Marcel Proust, Time Regained

“In the first place, [his eyes] never laughed when he laughed. Have you ever noticed this peculiarity some people have? It is either the sign of an evil nature or of a profound and lasting sorrow.”
― Lermontov a, Un Héros de notre temps. (précédé de) La Princesse Ligovskoï

“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.”
― Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince