Devon Ewalt > Devon's Quotes

“Our language has lost its ability to convey the spontaneous.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Devil Tree

“No one can help me find answers, least of all someone who claims he's found a solution to life.”
― Jerzy Kosiński

“Here we are, I thought, a bunch of grown-up kids locked in an empty room playing naive games with each other. No one understands anybody else. We are wandering around in dark caves, holding our little private candles, hoping for some great illumination. I don't like to think I'm as confused or simple-minded as the others, but if I really am more complex, more experienced than they are, why should I want them to understand me?”
― Jerzy Kosinksi

“As a boy I got the idea that death was an animal which lay curled inside waiting to swallow us.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Devil Tree

“When people claim to know who I am, I can no longer act freely.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Devil Tree

“So this is insanity. How interesting. What happens next?”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Devil Tree

“I have always suspected everyone who likes me of having poor judgment. I despise them for being so easily taken in.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Devil Tree

“There's a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Devil Tree

“I deserve no punishment at all for being who I am.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Devil Tree

“As a child I used to lie on the floor with my eyes tightly closed and hope that people would walk past without noticing me. That would mean I was truly invisible.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Devil Tree

“There is serenity and calm under the water's surface. You move easily and glimpse a world you have never seen before. You think of running out of oxygen and the idea of sharks dart out at you. You sense that there is something treacherous hiding behind every reef; no matter how much you explore you won't ever know what it is.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Devil Tree

“At first I was afraid that I would be left defenseless, that I would babble aloud the things I've always been terrified of saying. Instead, opium made me realize that I could say anything I liked without losing my identity.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Devil Tree

“I remember how, as a boy, I used to collect the cork tips of my father's cigarettes and stick them in my stamp albums. I believed they contained his unspoken words, which one day would explain everything. I have not changed. Now I explore my memories, trying to discover the substructure hidden beneath my past actions, searching for the link to connect them all.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Devil Tree

“I was pushing myself to extremes in order to discover my many selves.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Devil Tree

“I'm sure there are aspects of my personality buried within me that will surface as soon as I know I am completely loved.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Devil Tree

“What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?”
― Walter Kirn, She Needed Me

“How soon human beings forget what a privilege it is to live in freedom. A privilege, not an honor. An honor would mean we deserved it. We do not.”
― Walter Kirn, She Needed Me

“It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.”
― Walter Kirn, She Needed Me

“Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough.”
― Walter Kirn, She Needed Me

“Our faith was a flickering flame.”
― Walter Kirn, She Needed Me

“Though I no longer liked him or respected him, the thought of his disapproval frightened me.”
― Walter Kirn, She Needed Me

“They were gray, staring, bottomless, blank, fallen eyes whose pupils played scenes of heaven upside down.”
― Walter Kirn, She Needed Me

“Eyewitness News' is a clever plot to convince us that all the important events are happening somewhere else, to other people, at the same time we're literally dying in our beds.”
― Walter Kirn, She Needed Me

“You can't reclaim a thing that changes as you touch it.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Amnesia Moon

“The earth itself was unchangeable, the endless tracts of sand and water and pavement. It was the people, the perturbable madmen who roamed its surface, who viewed the world as transient and broken. Everett wished the earth could somehow reach up and still them, the crazy people, and invest them with its silence and permanence and depth.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Amnesia Moon

“I met someone who lives in an elevator.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Amnesia Moon

“I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Amnesia Moon

“I've learned not to trust what I see on television.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Amnesia Moon

“There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Amnesia Moon

“People have to be patient when they're talking to a nervous person.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Amnesia Moon