Lars Jerlach > Lars's Quotes

“I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.”
― John Cheever

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
― Albert Einstein

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.”
― Herodotus, The Histories

“If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.”
― W.C. Fields

“And the colors take me down
It's no reason to be sad
And you leave without a sound
It's no reason to be glad”
― Steve Kilbey

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“My life is a reading list.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“It seems so strange that the things I was chasing
Have all evaporated like a distant dream
Petty ambition, petty obstruction
Something in between

I really thought it would go on forever
Never believed they would sever the ties
All of the questions remaining unanswered
A stranger's reflection in a stranger's eyes”
― Steve Kilbey

“When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.”
― Mary Higgins Clark

“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.”
― William Faulkner

“Anything is a poem if you say it often enough.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Rain says a noise: shh. You can hear it when it comes down. It is God telling us to be quiet.”
― Howard Buten, When I Was Five I Killed Myself

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
― Franz Kafka

“By habit, she looked round the room she sat in. Anything she could do to it had been done; what it could do to her seemed without limit.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout

“The living have enough to worry about these days without the dead coming back to complicate things.”
― Kealan Patrick Burke, The Turtle Boy

“Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.”
― Howard Phillips Lovecraft

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Here’s a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.”
― Robin Sloan, Sourdough

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity.”
― William Blake

“There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics…Cretins don’t even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble…Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation…Fools don’t claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they’re magnificent…Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says that all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, therefore cats bark…Morons will occasionally say something that’s right, but they say it for the wrong reason…A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars…There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden…”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum