Charles > Charles's Quotes

“I drink to make other people more interesting.”
― Hemingway, Ernest

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.”
― Michel Houellebecq

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

“We loved with a love that was more than love.”
― Edgar Allen Poe

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“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

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Stories and Poems

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.”
― 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

“Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
" Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.”
― Thomas Mann

“This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected--in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.”
― Thomas Mann

“It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in allegory the basic themes and problems of his life.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead.”
― Lucille Ball

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Common sense is not so common.”
― Voltaire, A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst. ”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.”
― Vladimir Nabokov