Quotes - Chris (chrisrussell) (Ottawa, ON, Canada) Showing 1-30 of 60

#1

“The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.”
― Andre Breton

tags: art, imagination

191 likes

#2

“Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else - and failing.”
― Raymond Radiguet

34 likes

#3

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

tags: drinking

3215 likes

#3

“Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.”
― Peter De Vries, Reuben, Reuben

tags: misattributed-to-hemingway, writing-drinking

1770 likes

#4

“Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

tags: funny, humor, inspirational

639 likes

#4

“But the romantic atmosphere only heightened his feeling of icy fatness.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust

4 likes

#6

“Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

tags: pornography, science

65 likes

#6

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

3504 likes

#8

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
― Ernest Hemingway

tags: drinking

4215 likes

#8

“Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”
― J.G. Ballard

tags: ballard, language, science, technology

24 likes

#9

“We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

65 likes

#10

“Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

153 likes

#12

“When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”
― Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

31 likes

#12

“I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

148 likes

#12

“Though it is not often that death is so clearly told to fuck off.”
― Pynchon Thomas

77 likes

#14

“Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

44 likes

#16

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
― Henry James

tags: beauty, english, literature, summer

1524 likes

#18

“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

1008 likes

#18

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
― Henry James

tags: kindness

4879 likes

#18

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

tags: literature, reading, solitude

4212 likes

#19

“Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Collected Later Poems of Alvaro de Campos: 1928-1935

tags: chocolate, dessert, humour

358 likes

#20

“What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.”
― Fernando Pessoa , The Book of Disquiet

98 likes

#21

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

1205 likes

#22

“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

tags: dna, noise, self, soul

777 likes

#23

“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

tags: contemplation, life, spiritual, thinking

331 likes

#24

“Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.”
― Ali Smith, The Accidental

10 likes

#26

“Ninety-nine per cent of traditional English literature concerns people who never have to worry about money at all. We always seem to be watching or reading about emotional crises among folk who live in a world of great fortune both in matters of luck and money; stories and fantasies about rock stars and film stars, sporting millionaires and models; jet-setting members of the aristocracy and international financiers.”
― James Kelman

tags: aristocracy, crises, emotional, english-literature, fortune, money, worry

26 likes

#27

“But lassies are trained for it, in a manner of speaking; it's part of the growing-up process for them, young females. It doesn't happen with boys, just if you're a lassie, you've got to learn how not to talk; plus how not to look, you get trained how not to look. How not to look and how not to talk. You get trained how not to do things.”
― James Kelman

tags: women-scottish

11 likes

#28

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

tags: clouds, star

2022 likes

#30

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. ”
― Virginia Woolf , The Waves

357 likes

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