Panos Karnezis > Panos's Quotes

“I understand that in our work - doesn't matter whether it's acting or writing - what's important isn't fame or glamour, none of the things I used to dream about, it's the ability to endure.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“To achieve great success in literature you must have a certain coarseness in your composition... Really to move and influence men you must have complete understanding, and you can only get that if you have in you something of the common clay of humanity.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Merry-Go-Round

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“Science advances one funeral at a time.”
― Max Planck

“Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in the cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Nothing gladdens a writer more than a thought that can become pure feeling and a feeling that can become pure thought.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“But this graveyard of dead books doesn’t unnerve me. It reminds me that I had a deeper motive, one that only the approach of old age and death has unlocked. I wrote to answer questions I had — the motive of all art, whatever its ostensible subject. There were things I urgently needed to know.”
― James Atlas

“Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.”
― Robert Browning

“If you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop the story”
― Orson Welles

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude