Olga > Olga's Quotes

“The hypothesis of God, for instance, gives an incomparably absolute opportunity to understand everything and know absolutely nothing. Give man an extremely simplified system of the world and explain every phenomenon away on the basis of that system. An approach like that doesn't require any knowledge. Just a few memorized formulas plus so-called intuition and so-called common sense.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”
― Henry Miller

“Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.”
― Henry Miller

“Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“How are you, darling? Your momma didn’t tell me you were in town. But your momma isn’t talking to me right now—I disappointed her again somehow. You know how that goes. I know you know!” She let out a rocky smoker’s laugh and squeezed my arm. I assumed she was drunk. “I probably forgot to send her a card for something,” she babbled on, overgesturing with the hand that held a glass of wine. “Or maybe that gardener I recommended didn’t please her. I heard you’re doing a story about the girls; that’s just rough.”
― Anonymous

“My gosh, Nick, why are you so wonderful to me?'

He was supposed to say: You deserve it. I love you.

But he said, 'Because I feel sorry for you.'

'Why?'

'Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“У мамы теперь на ночном столике все время лежит Аввакум. Она то и дело повторяет: «Время приспе страдания. Подобает вам неослабно страдати». Сегодня она сказала, что когда-то эти слова прочитала, и они запомнились, но не поняла. «А теперь все стало так просто: наказание дается не за грехи вовсе, а за счастье. Все имеет свою цену: за счастье — горе, за любовь — роды, за рождение — смерть».”
― Anonymous

“The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d’habitude. Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation. In the study of entomology, or of deep sea life, or cellular activity, we derive more…”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Я отогнал эти дурацкие мысли и испуганно огляделся, как будто кто-то из присутствующих умел читать по моему лицу. Потом решил думать о другом и подумал, что Юра, должно быть, поздний ребенок. Может быть, они поздно поженились, а может — долго не было детей. А потом наконец родился — Юра. Вот ведь не повезло! Таким бы родителям нормального сына — здорового, красивого, умного… Тут я спохватился, что опять что-то из меня гаденькое полезло, быстренько вскочил, налил Стеше пепси-колы и положил салату (а то ведь она так весь вечер голодная и просидит), потом обслужил себя и Витьку.”
― Anonymous

“I can't sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature. I can't help it.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

“I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with it’s painful gall-stones, it’s gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul...”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“Ясно было одно: мы будем возвращены в лагерную зону, опять войдем в ворота с обязательной, официальной, казенной надписью: «Труд есть дело чести, дело славы, дело доблести и геройства». Говорят, что на воротах немецких лагерей выписывалась цитата из Ницше: «Каждому свое». Подражая Гитлеру, Берия превзошел его в циничности.”
― Anonymous

“She rubbed salt into it: I’m thoughtless, all right. Selfish, self-willed, I eat too much, and I feel like the Book of Common Prayer. Lord forgive me for not doing what I should have done and for doing what I shouldn’t have done—oh hell.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am.”
― Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

“Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything”
― Henry Miller, Sexus

“I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.”
― Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

“Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Words are loneliness.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.”
― Henry Miller

“If I were reading a book and happened to strike a wonderful passage I would close the book then and there and go for a walk. I hated the thought of coming to the end of a good book. I would tease it along, delay the inevitable as long as possible, But always, when I hit a great passage, I would stop reading immediately. Out I would go, rain, hail, snow or ice, and chew the cud.”
― Henry Miller, Plexus

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”
― John Updike, My Father's Tears and Other Stories

“By the time she was sixteen, Jane had heard enough about this to last her several lifetimes. In her mother’s account of the way things were, you were young briefly and then you fell. You plummeted downwards like an overripe apple and hit the ground with a squash; you fell, and everything about you fell too. You got fallen arches and a fallen womb, and your hair and teeth fell out. That’s what having a baby did to you. It subjected you to the force of gravity.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“3 people get stranded on a remote Island

A Banker, a Daily Mail reader & an Asylum seeker

All they have to eat is a box of 10 Mars bars

The Banker says "Because of my expertise in asset management, I''ll look after our resources"

The other 2 agree

So the Banker opens the box, gobbles down 9 of the Mars bars and hands the last one to the Daily Mail reader

He then says " I'd keep an eye on that Asylum seeker, he's after your Mars Bar”
― Christopher Brookmyre, When the Devil Drives

“[Her life] had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hair-brush and told, "There you go." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.”
― Lorrie Moore, Birds of America: Stories

“Why do girls always feel like they have to apologize for giving an opinion or taking up space in the world? Have you ever noticed that?" Nicole asked. "You go on websites and some girl leaves a post and if it's longer than three sentences or she's expressing her thoughts about some topic, she usually ends with, 'Sorry for the rant' or 'That may be dumb, but that's what I think.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens