top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Novelist
"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."
337
"I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy."
110
"Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness."
103
"Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger."
102
"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
99
"What's the book like?""Well, some of it's twaddle, but mostly it's just piffle. Cheers!"
95
"Every gift from a friend is a wish for your happiness."
91
"The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth."
90
"There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant."
86
"Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another."
83
"What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what's behind them."
82
"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
81
"If the infinity of the sea may call out thus, perhaps when a man is growing old, calls come to him, too, from another infinity still darker and more deeply mysterious; and the more he is wearied by life the dearer are those calls to him."
76
"To know ourselves, is agreed by all to be the most useful Learning; the first Lessons, therefore, given us ought to be on that Subject."
76
"Without literature my life would be miserable."
74
"When thinking about companions gone, we feel ourselves doubly alone."
73
"I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."
70
"Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life."
70
"Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought."
69
"The clever men at Oxford, know all that there is to be knowed. But they none of them know one half as much, as intelligent Mr. Toad."
68
"If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?"
67
"Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more priviledged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex."
67
"He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: "Only God knows how much I loved you."
67
"Love does not exist. There exists the physical need for intercourse, and the rational need for a mate in life."
67
"It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut."
66
"A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."
66
"O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!"
66
bottom of page