Julia > Julia's Quotes

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”
― Ernest Hemingway

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside. ”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
― Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
― Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology With Commentaries

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I shall endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Let this hell be our heaven.”
― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

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

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“If somebody says 'I love you' to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? 'I love you, too'.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

“Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.”
― Friedrich Neitzsche

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“That the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty”
― David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

“I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace