David Cain > David's Quotes

“you aren't alone because you are ugly or unattractive - you are alone because everyone, including you, is afraid to express themselves - practice self expression and the world is yours”
― David Charles Cain

“I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them. ”
― Boris Pasternak

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

“The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
― William Blake

“It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.”
― Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Elizabeth Appell

“All the hallucinogen drugs are considered sacred by those who use them -- there are Peyote Cults and Bannisteria Cults, Hashish Cults and Mushroom Cults - "the Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico enable a man to see God" -- but no one ever suggested that junk is sacred. There are no opium cults. Opium is profane and quantitative like money.”
― Anonymous

“The Daniel, the third poem of the MS., is SO dull that it is no matter who wrote it or when it was written.”
― Anonymous

“Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.”
― Emile Zola

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gifts: an essay

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Even the holiest of lights must lose some of its glory when it is reduced to a function of the real world.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“know it doesn’t look good for me to keep writing about my empty stomach, and it’s particularly unpoetic in this context, but that can’t be helped.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“However bad you may feel, however great your anguish, however convinced you may be that your soul is trying to escape, your stomach empties itself out just fine.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“And I can still see each word now, indelibly etched on my brain: DRINKS. EATS. SNACKS. Whatever senility may lie in store for me, I know that I shall never lose the ability to write these three words exactly as I saw them then.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“When I call him a fool, I mean it only in the sense that he was just as pitiful a creature as I was, and implying the sympathy of one fool for another.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“Disputes of this sort are absolutely pointless; they arise because there are lots of people around who are very clever but who don’t know the first thing about the human heart.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“They don’t realize that water never comes back once it’s flowed away; while you’re dillydallying, it evaporates.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“Going to ruin by yourself is far lonelier than going to ruin with someone else.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“And if it turned out that I had to go to some kind of Hell when I died, I’d probably choose a Hell with demons over one where there was nobody besides me.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“I was shocked to witness the boy’s casual acceptance of Chōzō’s offer, but at the same time I came to see that there were a considerable number of people on this earth who, like me, would follow wherever led, satisfied to drift along with the flow. In Tokyo, people are dizzyingly mobile, but even as they move, their roots are firmly planted.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“Having read little poetry or other prettified writing, I was free of the pretensions it takes to view your own situation as a novel, to go dashing back and forth across the novelistic landscape making a great show of your pain and sorrow, all the while observing your own pitiful state from a place apart and gushing over how terribly poetic it is.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“I had known the word “passive” since I was a kid, but now its meaning became clear to me for the first time in a moment of enlightenment.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“As long as you have tears to shed, you can certainly still laugh.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“It’s only natural for the passive creature of yesteryear to become arrogant today. That’s just the way people are.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“You hear about people warning others not to forget what they’ve done for them in their hour of need, but of course they’re going to forget. Swearing otherwise is just a lie.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner