Timothy Ma > Timothy's Quotes

“He was as powerless and lonely as a river confronting the sea.”
― Haruki Murakami

“Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Oh, darling, I've been so miserable.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slip-over jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“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

“It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“The lake was silent for some time. Finally, it said:
"I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“If good things are coming, they will be a pleasant surprise," said the seer. "If bad things are, and you know in advance, you will suffer greatly before they even occur.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“I've crossed these sands many times," said one of the camel drivers one night. "But the desert is so huge, and the horizons so distant, that they make a person feel small, and as if he should remain silent."

The boy understood intuitively what he meant, even without ever having set foot in the desert before. Whenever he saw the sea, or a fire, he fell silent, impressed by their elemental force.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“But now and then there appears a novel which opens up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar.”
― George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays

“With Rue My Heart Is Laden

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.”
― A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

“The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.”
― George Orwell

“He is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face toward the flames.”
― George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays

“A faint clap of thunder Clouded skies,
Perhaps rain comes
Will you stay here with me?”
― Makoto Shinkai, The Garden of Words

“England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus”
― George Orwell, England Your England

“Do you hate people?”

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

“Today I have so much to do:
I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn my soul to stone,
I must learn to live again--”
― Anna Akhmatova

“Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor;
Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised!
Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon:
Be it lawful I take up what's cast away.
Gods, gods! 'tis strange that from their cold'st neglect
My love should kindle to inflamed respect.
Thy dowerless daughter, king, thrown to my chance,
Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France:
Not all the dukes of waterish Burgundy
Can buy this unprized precious maid of me.
Bid them farewell, Cordelia, though unkind:
Thou losest here, a better where to find.”
― William Shakespeare , King Lear

“When the
mind's free,
The Body's delicate.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“You are not worth the dust which the rude wind blows in your face”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“Love and be silent.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“Fortune, that arrant whore, Ne’er turns the key to the poor.”
― William Shakespeare

“Consider him well.—Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Here’s three on ’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself.
Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.—”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“We came crying hither.
Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear