Samuel > Samuel's Quotes

“Nothing records the effects of a sad life so graphically as the human body.”
― Naguib Mahfouz

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen - there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“I begin with writing the first
sentence—and trusting to Almighty
God for the second.”
― Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?”
― Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.”
― James Joyce

“Love loves to love love.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.”
― Philip Larkin, High Windows

“The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself 'together with' others or 'at home in' the world, but, on the contrary, he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation; moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as 'split' in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on.”
― R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

“A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality' than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is fixed.”
― R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

“He had all along felt that he was, in his own words (which incidentally are also Heidegger's), 'on the fringe of being', with only one foot in life and with no right even to that. He felt that he was not really alive and that anyway he was of no value and had hardly the right to the pretension of having life.”
― R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

“A book is a suicide postponed.”
― Cioran

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison