K > K's Quotes

“No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“As Bokonon says: 'peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“The Answer to the Great Question... Of Life, the Universe and Everything... Is... Forty-two,' said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. That's the city”
― Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes

“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“It's a curious idea to reproduce when you don't even like life.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“You don't become a runner by winning a morning workout. The only true way is to marshal the ferocity of your ambition over the course of many day, weeks, months, and (if you could finally come to accept it) years. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Once a Runner

“I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.”
― Nikolai Gogol

“People conceptualize conditioning in different ways," he said. "Some think it's a ladder straight up. Others see plateaus, blockages, ceilings. I see it as a geometric spiraling upward, with each spin of the circle taking you a different distance upward. Some spins may even take you downward, just gathering momentum for the next upswing. Sometimes you will work your fanny off and see very little gain; other times you will amaze yourself and not really know why.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Once a Runner

“Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.”
― Witold Gombrowicz

“I don't like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Whatever

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight”
― Ezra Pound

“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
― Ayn Rand

“What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History