K > K's Quotes

“Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,' Holly advised him. 'That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."
"She's drunk," Joe Bell informed me.
"Moderately," Holly confessed....Holly lifted her martini. "Let's wish the Doc luck, too," she said, touching her glass against mine. "Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc -- it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“The scenes in our life resemble pictures in a rough mosaic; they are ineffective from close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem beautiful. That is why to attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and why, though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving as the only road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have been living the whole time ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely that in expectation of which they lived.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“Even a brick wants to be something.
A brick wants to be something.
It aspires.
Even a common, ordinary brick... wants to be something more than it is.
It wants to be something better than it is.”
― Louis Kahn

“The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.”
― William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?”
― John Irving, My Movie Business: A Memoir

“I know what I have given you...
I do not know what you have received.”
― Antonio Porchia

“A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to peer out.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg