Karla > Karla's Quotes

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face”
― Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice

“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.”
― Woody Allen

“I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.”
― David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

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

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

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

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Years fly by, but the heart stays in the same place.”
― Harlan Coben, Promise Me

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
― Neil Gaiman

“..."better to have loved and lost" bullshit. Don't show me paradise and then burn it down.”
― Harlan Coben

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I've got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts - you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn't do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing.”
― D.D. Barant, Dying Bites

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations

“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
― Albert Camus

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
― Albert Camus

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
― Albert Camus