Nick > Nick's Quotes

“Artists,” he said, “are people who say, 'I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
― Donald Woods Winnicott

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? ”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat.”
― Charles Bukowski

“People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“How strange! I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus

“Live to the point of tears.”
― Albert Camus

“Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they’re wonderful, and that they’re going to have a baby that’s wonderful, when actually they’re as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we’re so wonderful doesn’t mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind: astronomy has its caricaturist in astrology, chemistry used to have alchemy. So”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it. Zaphod”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
― Virginia Woolf

“She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
― Virginia Woolf

“How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?”
― Virginia Woolf

“One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“How inappropriate to call this planet "Earth," when it is clearly "Ocean.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.”
― Arthur C Clarke

“Now I'm a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

“Sometimes when I'm in a bookstore or library, I am overwhelmed by all the things that I do not know. Then I am seized by a powerful desire to read all the books, one by one.”
― Arthur C Clarke

“I even felt a touch of sympathy for the difficulties he had faced in his life, however stupid and repulsive the shape of that life might appear to me.”
― Haruki Murakami

“It’s a lot easier to be angry at someone than it is to tell them you’re hurt.”
― Tom Gates