top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Novelist
"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."
149
"I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy."
84
"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
79
"Every gift from a friend is a wish for your happiness."
78
"There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant."
77
"Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another."
73
"The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth."
67
"What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what's behind them."
65
"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."
62
"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."
60
"Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought."
59
"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."
57
"Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life."
57
"Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
56
"Without literature my life would be miserable."
55
"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."
54
"When a deep injury is done us, we never recover until we forgive."
54
"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."
53
"The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next."
53
"When thinking about companions gone, we feel ourselves doubly alone."
52
"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion."
52
"In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner."
51
"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."
51
"Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?"
51
"If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?"
50
"If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow."
50
"The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good."
50
bottom of page