Alan > Alan's Quotes

“Esti now discovered for the first time what intellectually fertile soil a railway compartment is. Here the lives of strangers appear before us in, as it were, cross section — suddenly and condensed — as in a novel opened haphazardly in the middle. Our curiosity, which otherwise we conceal by false modesty, can be satisfied under the constraint of our being enclosed together in a moving room, and we can peep into those lives and speculate on what the beginning of the novel must have been and how it will end.”
― Dezső Kosztolányi, Kornél Esti

“We carry within ourselves the direction our lives will take. Within ourselves burn the timeless, fateful stars.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“What a shame that those moments when man is noble and pure and akin to the angels are so transient, so fleeting, while that complicated nonentity the Ego is always with us - of which one can speak only in terms of protective tenderness and gentle irony.”
― Antal Szerb

“Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84