Jason > Jason's Quotes

“How strange! I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“At the age of 40, having ordered meat very rare in restaurants all his life, he realized he actually liked it medium and not at all rare.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“He’d always been willing to confess his faults, for, by admitting them, it was as if he made them no longer exist.”
― Truman Capote, The Complete Stories of Truman Capote

“You are damned, and we wish to share your damnation.”
― Ayn Rand, Anthem

“Purple? Boy, what kind of a homosexual are you, anyway? That's not purple, Mary, that color up there is mauve.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.”
― A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and I hollered "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“You don't bless what you love...It's when you want to love and you can't manage it. You stretch out your hands and you say God forgive me that I can't love but bless this thing anyway...We have to bless what we hate...It would be better to love, but that's not always possible.”
― Graham Greene, Complete Short Stories

“Nothing good is a miracle, nothing lovely is a dream.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

“Self-pity is egotism undiluted, after all—self-centeredness in its purest form.”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“There's no excuse for a dull book, a dull museum, or a dull speech. Especially when dealing with history—the most fascinating subject I know.”
― Richard Norton Smith

“I like to see an angry Englishman," said Poirot. "They are very amusing. The more emotional they feel the less command they have of language.”
― Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express

“She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

“Wesley, the younger child, had had rheumatic fever when he was seven and Mrs. May thought this was what had caused him to be an intellectual.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

“Mrs. May winced. She thought the word Jesus should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

“I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place”
― Gore Vidal

“I like to be alone. Also, I drift, perhaps. When in a crowd, nothing seems to be worth while, and one is an ant in a hurrying mass. Alone, thoughts come with force. They strike one as bluntly as seen things impress themselves.”
― Charles J. Finger, In Lawless Lands

“A wise friend told me that we all could use more than one set of parents—our relations with the original set are too intense, and need dissipating.”
― Alice Adams, Beautiful Girl: Stories

“I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
'But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks.
'The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,' Marco answers, 'but by the line of the arch that they form.'
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: 'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.'
Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Sure, that's what I mean,' Doc Daneeka said. 'A little grease is what makes this world go round. One hand washes the other. Know what I mean? You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.'

Yossarian knew what he meant.

That's not what I meant,' Doc Daneeka said, as Yossarian began scratching his back.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“I had come out of the city, where story-telling is a manufactured science, to the country where story-telling is a by-product of life.”
― Dana Burnet, The Best American Short Stories Of 1916: And The Yearbook Of The American Short Story

“In the country, a semicircle is the shortest line between two points.”
― Dana Burnet, The Best American Short Stories Of 1916: And The Yearbook Of The American Short Story