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Quotes by Novelist
"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."
98
"Every gift from a friend is a wish for your happiness."
69
"I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy."
62
"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
58
"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."
53
"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."
48
"Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
47
"There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant."
46
"What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what's behind them."
42
"Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought."
42
"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."
42
"Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings."
42
"Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another."
Life,
41
"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."
41
"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."
40
"If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing."
40
"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion."
40
"In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility."
39
"Without literature my life would be miserable."
39
"O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!"
39
"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."
38
"If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?"
38
"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."
37
"Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens."
37
"Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow."
37
"But everything of value about me is in my books."
37
"I think all writing is done through memory."
36
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