ben > ben's Quotes

“What a sad paradox, though Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze the path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either - Or

“Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.”
― Hermann Hesse

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.”
― Benjamin Franklin Wade

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.”
― Dorothy Parker, While Rome Burns

“Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.”
― Peter De Vries, Reuben, Reuben

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
― Noam Chomsky

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“The world is really wild at heart and weird on top.”
― Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart

“There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.”
― Roberto Bolaño

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
― Roberto Bolano

“Only great challenges make it worthwhile to pack up and move all one's books.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003

“I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson