Jonathan > Jonathan's Quotes

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
― Dylan Thomas, In Country Sleep, and Other Poems

“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
― Emerson

“They're such beautiful shirts,' she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. 'It makes me sad because I've never seen such - such beautiful shirts before.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
― John Donne, No man is an island – A selection from the prose

“All that hatred down there," he said, "all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart.”
― James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues

“I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself.”
― Robert Frost, Mending Wall

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“The time has come," the walrus said, "to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages and kings”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
He chortled in his joy.”
― Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky

“What art thou Faustus, but a man condemned to die?”
― Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus

“I would prefer not to.”
― Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Volume 2

“The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Do I dare Disturb the universe?”
― T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Prufrock and Other Poems

“What happens to a dream deferred?”
― Langston Hughes

“Adrian Veidt: I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end.

Dr. Manhattan: 'In the end'? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”
― Cecil Beaton

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind--”
― Emily Dickinson

“What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.”
― Marcel Proust

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“Weakened minds see everything through a black veil; the soul forms its own horizons; your soul is darkened, and consequently the sky of your future appears stormy and unpromising.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo