David Grassé > David's Quotes

“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“The answer is good things only happen to you if you're good. Good? Honest is more what I mean... Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“Tell me, as a pagan, who do you worship?'

'Worship?'

'That's right. I imagine you must have a pretty wide open field. So to whom do you set up your household altar? To whom do you bow down? To whom do you pray to at dawn and at dusk?'

'The female principle. It's an empowerment thing. You know.'

'Indeed. And this female principle of yours. Does she have a name?'

'She's the goddess within us all. She doesn't need a name.'

'Ah,' said Wednesday, with a wide monkey grin, 'so do you hold mighty bacchanals in her honour? Do you drink blood wine under the full moon, while scarlet candles burn in silver candle holders? Do you step naked into the seafoam, chanting ecstactically to your nameless goddess while the waves lick at your legs, lapping your thighs like the tongues of a thousand leopards?”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. ‘This is my last experiment,’ wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. ‘If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I’ll have to be shown.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide

“Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete ”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide

“I am my heart’s undertaker. Daily I go and retrieve its tattered remains, place them delicately into its little coffin, and bury it in the depths of my memory, only to have to do it all again tomorrow.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“Pain produces progress. So if you truly love me, you will try to hurt me as much as you can. If you really want me to grow as a person, you will water me with betrayal, abuse, neglect, derision, thievery, and possibly even torture.”
― Jarod Kintz, Love quotes for the ages. Specifically ages 18-81.

“If you break little promises, you'll break big ones.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don't deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“I read in the papers here a while back some teachers came across a survey that was sent out back in the thirties to a number of schools around the country. Had this questionnaire about what was the problems with teachin in the schools. And they come across these forms, they'd been filled out and sent in from around the country answerin these questions. And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin gum. Copyin homework. Things of that nature. So they got one of them forms that was blank and printed up a bunch of em and sent em back out to the same schools. Forty years later. Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide. So think about that. Because a lot of the time when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I'm gettin old. That it's one of the symptoms. But my feelin about that is that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I've got. Forty years is not a long time neither. Maybe the next forty of it will bring some of em out from under the ether. If it aint too late.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“I don't know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful, it will make little difference whether she lives at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“I'm frightened of the intellectualism that can insulate us from action and turn the problems and solutions into puzzles or fantasies.”
― Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words

“The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches, and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,
A mechanised automaton.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Libraries are about Freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

“October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 4: Season of Mists

“In response to my question, brother shook his head.
"Then he's dead," I said. And repeated myself , something I don't often do: "Then he's dead." What is strange was that when I uttered those words, nothing happened. The state of the universe was no worse than usual. Sleeping the same old sleep, everything continued to wear down as if nothing was amiss.”
― Gaétan Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

“First I alighted my eyes with the back of the room and the big flaking mirror. I mean it was covered with patches of verdigris scale, It was no longer reflecting colours, which is the fate of sick mirrors. Everything was cast back in black and white and ash, with a dry taste of bygone days. It could have been a mirror that had stopped the way a clock does, that reflected not the present nowadays time of the room but face from the most distant memory, like when death wins out over life, believe me if you can, and this is why.”
― Gaétan Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

“In short, whoever does violence to truth or its expression eventually mutilates justice, even though he thinks he is serving it. From this point of view, we shall deny to the very end that a press is true because it is revolutionary; it will be revolutionary only if it is true, and never otherwise.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“As to the kind of truth one finds in books, it is a truth that enables us sometimes to discern what things are not, without ever enabling us to discover what they are.”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

“LUCIFER: They say what they must sing and say on pain
Of being that which I am and thou art--
Of spirits and of men.

CAIN: And what is that?

LUCIFER: Souls who dare use their immortality,
Souls who dare look the omnipotent tyrant in
His everlasting face and tell him that
His evil is not good!”
― George Gordon Byron, Cain: A Mystery

“The romantic hero is also "fatal" because, to the extent that he increases in power and genius, the power of evil increases in him. Every manifestation of power, every excess, is thus covered by this "It is so." That the artist, particularly the poet, should be demoniac is a very ancient idea, which is formulated provocatively in the work of the romantics. At this period there is even an imperialism of evil, whose aim is to annex everything, even the most orthodox geniuses. "What made Milton write with constraint," Blake observes, "when he spoke of angels and of God, and with audacity when he spoke of demons and of hell, is that he was a real poet and on the side of the demons, without knowing it." The poet, the genius, man himself in his most exalted image, therefore cry out simultaneously with Satan: "So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, farewell remorse. . . . Evil, be thou my good." It is the cry of outraged innocence.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“Ah, when one has not the gift of rendering one's grief superbly and transforming it into literary or musical passages which weep magnificently, the best thing is to keep still about it.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Mme. Chantelouve would never realize the ideal he had fashioned for himself, the tantalizing features, the agile, wild animal body, the melancholy and ardent bearing, which he had dreamed. Indeed, the mere fact of knowing the unknown rendered her less desirable, more vulgar. Accessibility killed the chimera.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“It's foolish to let my thoughts wander this way," he said, drawing himself up, "but daydream is the only good thing in life. Everything else is vulgar and empty.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“The only women you can continue to love are those you lose.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans

“The heart, said to be man’s noblest organ, has the same shape as the penis, commonly supposed the most ignoble; the symbolism is not inappropriate, because the love which comes from the heart soon extends to the organ which it resembles.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Persons of good sense are necessarily dull, because they revolve over and over again the tedious topics of everyday life.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas