Curtis > Curtis's Quotes

“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Suicide in the trenches:

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

* * * * *

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.”
― Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“The old Lie:Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”
― Wilfred Owen

“What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifle's rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers, nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells,
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes,
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall,
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each, slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.”
― Wilfred Owen, The War Poems

“Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one”
― Wilfred Owen

“O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?”
― Wilfred Owen, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen

“The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird

“How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet’s intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.”
― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

“Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?
And, live we how we can, yet die we must.”
― William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part III

“But God will know the slow tread of an old couple’s love for each other, and understand how black shadows make part of its whole.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

“Who knows what will come when quick-tongued men make ancient grievances rhyme with fresh desire for land and conquest?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

“Are you still there, Axl?”
“Still here, princess.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

“Foolishness, sir. How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly? Or a peace hold for ever built on slaughter and a magician’s trickery?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

“Then he took the sword in both hands and raised it—and Gawain’s posture took on an unmistakable grandeur.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant