Kit > Kit's Quotes

“What is the purpose of life?...To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool!”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“Life in itself is sufficient, self-explanatory and complete.”
― Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan

“Seek and see all the marvels around you. You will get tired of looking at yourself alone, and that fatigue will make you deaf and blind to everything else. - Don Juan”
― Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

“The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.”
― Michel Houellebecq

“Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.”
― Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
― Eugene V. Debs

“A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government in earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

“HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

“Every thing you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.”
― Franz Kafka, Kafka's Selected Stories: A Norton Critical Edition

“But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?”
― Franz Kafka

“Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.”
― Milan Kundera

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”
― Franz Kafka

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
― Franz Kafka

“Books are a narcotic.”
― Franz Kafka

“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
― Franz Kafka

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”
― Franz Kafka

“You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.”
― Franz Kafka

“everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“The creatures reproduce by flaking. The young, when shed by a parent, are indistinguishable from dandruff.

There is only one sex.

Every creature simply sheds flakes of his own kind, and his own kind is like everybody else's kind.

There is no childhood as such. Flakes begin flaking three Earthling hours after they themselves have been shed.

They do not reach maturity, then deteriorate and die. They reach maturity and stay in full bloom, so to speak, for as long as Mercury cares to sing.

There is no way in which one creature can harm another, and no motive for one’s harming another.

Hunger, envy, ambition, fear, indignation, religion, and sexual lust are irrelevant and unknown.

The creatures only have one sense: touch.

They have weak powers of telepathy. The messages they are capable of transmitting and receiving are almost as monotonous as the song of Mercury. They have only two possible messages. The first is an automatic response to the second, and the second is an automatic response to the first.

The first is, "Here I am, here I am, here I am."

The second is, "So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Every pain, addiction, anguish, longing, depression, anger or fear
is an orphaned part of us
seeking joy,
some disowned shadow
wanting to return
to the light
and home
of ourselves.”
― Jacob Nordby