Favorite Quotations

Stuff on Paper: A to K

Stuff on Paper: L to Z

It's *hard* being a rock; they have such a strange sense of time - and priorities.

You don't spend most of your life in other people's heads without losing every prejudice you ever had.

On peut citer de mauvais vers quand ils sont d'un grand poète.
One can cite bad poetry when it's by a great poet.

One has to be human, and have a heart and a penis if one is going to escape being either a god or a Bolshevist ... for they are the same thing; they're both too good to be true.

It's hard to ravish a tin of sardines.

Hate's a growing thing like anything else. It's the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas onto life, of forcing one's deepest instincts; our deepest feelings we force according to certain ideas.

Logic might be unanswerable because it was so absolutely wrong.

I'd be ashamed to see a woman walking around with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk.

I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.

I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.

Most people these days have very expensive brains that they have spent a lifetime filling with information, not to speak of decades of developing a personality loved by friends and family. Protect this investment!

Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.

Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

Love is an obsolete emotion, ranking in usefulness somewhere between earwigs and toe mold.

She decided, without ever deciding, that she would continue travelling by night. It was too important a matter, this talking to people, and listening to them, to do it lightly or often.

It's hard to look too grand when you're led by someone who looks like a pudding with legs.

Il ne faut pas beaucoup d'esprit pour montrer ce qu'on sait, mais il en faut infiniment pour enseigner ce qu'on ignore.
It doesn't take a lot of wit to show what one knows, but it takes an infinite amount to teach what one doesn't know.

Si les triangles faisaient un dieu, ils lui donneraient trois côtés.
If triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.

The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

Pratchett quotations

L'existence de Dieu, le pourquoi de la vie, tout cela n'était-il vraiment qu'une question de glandes?
The existence of God, the why of life, was all that really only a question of glands?

It's really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.

He was very intelligent and all, but you could tell he didn't have too much brains.

If you are squeamish
don't prod the
beach rubble

Alas! Victor, when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?

...Yet he failed somehow, in spite of a mediocrity that should have insured any man a success.

But oh, mesdames, if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and tetrameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every school teacher perish miserably!

All [people] are intolerant....; Only they're intolerant of different things.

Never in my wildest nightmares did I imagine you'd fall so high.

Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless.

A clear conscience is generally the result of a faulty memory, not a faulty life.

Sex is like air; it's only important when you're not getting any.

Infatuation is when you think he's as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen, and as athletic as Jimmy Conners. Love is when you realize that he's as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Conners, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger, and nothing like Robert Redford--but you'll take him anyway.

Nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.

»Sehen Sie«, sagte er schließlich - und für eine Sekunde packte sie die Angst, sie könnte ihn schon jetzt, für immer, enttäuscht haben - »das hab ich vermeiden wollen. Im Schneematsch stehen, auf Gießkannen und Kinderbadewannen starren und nicht wissen, wie's weitergehen soll.«
»Wieso denn?« sagte Rita. [...] »Wir lassen den Roman einfach ablaufen.«
"You see," he said finally - and for a second she was afraid that she could have already disappointed him forever - "this is what I wanted to avoid. Standing in the slush, staring at watering pots and bathtubs and not knowing how to continue."
"Why's that?" said Rita. [...] "We simply let the novel go on."

It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality, so that Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift - plate, linen, houses, men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion - had only to open a book for the whole vast accumulation to turn to mist. The nine acres of stone which were his house vanished; one hundred and fifty indoor servants disappeared; his eighty riding horses became invisible [. . .]. So it was, and Orlando would sit by himself, reading, a naked man.

No, he concluded, the great age of literature is past; the great age of literature was the Greek; the Elizabethan age was inferior in every respect to the Greek. [. . .] Much though it hurt him to say it - for he loved literature as he loved his life - he could see no good in the present and had no hope of the future. Here he poured himself out another glass of wine.

'And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? Confound it all,' [Orlando] cried, 'why say Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and leave it?

For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say 'good to eat' when they mean 'beautiful' and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.

No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue - but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water.

The present participle is the devil himself.

If rapiers are forbidden, one must have recourse to toads. Moreover, toads and laughter between them sometimes do what cold steel cannot. She laughed.

For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on top of St. Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet.

In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or people of substance.

Ils causaient ainsi, à coeur couvert, sans avoir besoin de mots, parlant d'autre chose...  Ils auraient pu brusquement continuer leurs confidences à voix haute, sans cesser de se comprendre.
They talked so, with secret hearts, without needing words, talking of other things... They could have suddenly continued their confessions aloud, without ceasing to understand each other.

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