Zeynep > Zeynep's Quotes

“The bartenders are the regular band of Jack, and the heavenly drummer who looks up to the sky with blue eyes, with a beard, is wailing beer-caps of bottles and jamming on the cash register and everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, its béat, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown.”
― Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

“The only circumstances in which I would write a roman a clef would be if I'd lost my fucking car keys.”
― Will Self, Dorian

“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which is deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“And one day the mind leaps from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant hears God, sees God.”
― Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations

“[...] the primal, animal sense of ‘the other,’ which may have evolved for the detection of threat, can take on a lofty, even transcendent function in human beings, as a biological basis for religious passion and conviction, where the 'other,’ the 'presence,’ becomes the person of God.”
― Oliver Sacks

“Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.”
― W. G. Sebald

“Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know, and that's what God is. It's what you don't know - the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar ...”
― Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam

“The Turk aroused my antipathies almost at once. He had a mania for logic which infuriated me. It was bad logic too. And like the others, all of whom I violently disagreed with, I found in him an expression of the American spirit at its worst. Progress was their obession. More machines, more efficiency, more capital, more comforts – that was their whole talk. I asked them if they had heard of the millions who were unemployed in America. They ignored the question. I asked them if they realized how empty, restless and miserable the American people with all their machinemade luxuries and comforts. They were impervious to my sarcasm. What they had wanted was success - money, power, a place in the sun.”
― Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

“Parental care, satisfaction, friendship, compassion, and grief didn’t just suddenly appear with the emergence of modern humans. All began their journey in pre-human beings. Our brain’s provenance is inseparable from other species’ brains in the long cauldron of living time. And thus, so is our mind.”
― Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

“So I say to him: Lord, make an exception of me. Since You are All-Powerful, destroy my soul rather than my body. I don’t want to become dust and ashes —— ashes, what a lovely word, but never mind that — I would prefer to remain a body, to keep my skin, my bones, my legs. I could manage without a soul. Lord, deprive me of consciousness, memory, imagination, even the power of speech, but leave me my senses. Not a day has passed since the beginning of the holidays, when I have not striven to kill my soul.”
― Christine de Rivoyre, Boy

“And I became fixated, too, upon Katharine Hepburn’s famous Fred and Ginger theory: He gives her class, she gives him sex. Was this a general rule? Did all friendships—all relations—involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power?”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“...the men are undone by the need to master, and the women by the power of self-doubt.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life

“A man whose eyes love opens risks his soul -
His dancing breaks beyond the mind's control.”
― Attar of Nishapur

“The home we seek is in eternity;
The Truth we seek is like a shoreless sea,
Of which your paradise is but a drop.
This ocean can be yours; why should you stop
Beguiled by dreams of evanescent dew?
The secrets of the sun are yours, but you
Content yourself with motes trapped in its beams.
Turn to what truly lives, reject what seems --
Which matters more, the body or the soul?
Be whole: desire and journey to the Whole.”
― Attar of Nishapur

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.”
― Dorothy Parker

“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Collected Dorothy Parker

“Tell him I was too fucking busy-- or vice versa.”
― Dorothy Parker

“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“She could not explain in so many words, but she felt that those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.”
― E. M. Forster, Howard's End

“But I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.”
― Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 9: 1861

“Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem