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Quotes by Novelist
"One may speak about anything on earth with fire, with enthusiasm, with ecstasy, but one only speaks about oneself with avidity."
14
"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."
14
"I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and reasonably applied, but to be forever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar."
14
"Several tons of dynamite are set off in this picture - none of it under the right people."
14
"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception."
14
"A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die."
14
"If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic."
14
"One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived."
14
"Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves."
14
"Admiration and familiarity are strangers."
14
"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."
14
"The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible."
14
"This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity-that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself-and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!"
14
"Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost."
14
"Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like."
Work,
14
"It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be."
14
"The gratification of wealth is not found in mere possession or in lavish expenditure, but in its wise application."
14
"If you don't learn to laugh at troubles, you won't have anything to laugh at when you grow old."
Old,
14
"One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years."
14
"From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past."
14
"Orito banishes all thoughts of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet."
14
"To find the balance you want, this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have 4 legs instead of 2. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God."
14
"Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality."
14
"As told by Kafka's close friend Max Brod:"Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. 'Now at least I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore.' It was the time he turned strictly vegetarian."
14
"You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know."
14
"We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look."
14
"When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader."
14
"It's always obvious to me when someone is looking at me with an idea of who I am and hoping that that's the person I'm going to be. No matter how subtle it is, it's there, and you want to give them who they really want. But it ain't me."
14
"Tis the only comfort of the miserable to have partners in their woes."
14
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