Walter Ullon > Walter's Quotes

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life. While there remains even a plaintive memory, a person cannot be cut off, dead. And he thought, “It’s a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man’s life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness.”
― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown

“None of us are getting out of here alive, so please stop treating yourself like an after thought. Eat the delicious food. Walk in the sunshine. Jump in the ocean. Say the truth you're carrying in your heart like hidden treasure. Be silly. Be kind. Be weird. There's no time for anything else.”
― Nanea Hoffman

“Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”
― Victor Hugo

“There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention- that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary- the sunshine, the memories, the future,- which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.”
― George Santayana

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Engineers can prove that a bumblebee, with its heavy body and little bitty wings, can't fly. But nobody tells the bumblebees ... and they fly just fine.”
― Bill Bowerman

“All ingredients need salt. The noodle or tender spring pea would be narcissistic to imagine it already contained within its cell walls all the perfection it would ever need. We seem, too, to fear that we are failures at being tender and springy if we need to be seasoned. It’s not so: it doesn’t reflect badly on pea or person that either needs help to be most itself.”
― Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
― E.B. White

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
― Mark Twain

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices First Series

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“At every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.”
― Paulo Coelho

“When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'.”
― Groucho Marx

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence

“A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire.... Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, BAUDELAIRE - the Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
― Howard Thurman

“cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards. Through”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“Now this is the Law of the Jungle -- as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back --
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”
― Booker T. Washington

“It’s not the rats who first abandon a sinking ship. It’s the crew members who know how to swim.”
― Antonio Garcia Martinez, Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

“And also don’t forget, the reason opportunity is often missed is that it usually comes disguised as hard work.”
― Clifford Irving, Trial

“If something seems completely doomed, just give it a little more time. Worst case scenario, you get to be right. Just find out for sure.”
― Jon Bois

“You won't find reasonable men on the tops of tall mountains.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“We invented fire, repeatedly messed up, and then invented the fire extinguisher, fire exit, fire alarm and fire department.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“Let him who has not a single speck of migration to blot his family escutcheon cast the first stone...if you didn't migrate then your father did, and if your father didn't need to move from place to place, then it was only because your grandfather before him had no choice but to go, put his old life behind him in search of the bread that his own land denied him...”
― José Saramago, The Notebook