Gary Power > Gary's Quotes

“Misfortunes one can endure--they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults--ah!--there is the sting of life.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka