Quote collection
319 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Yes, there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who are dead, but all the others. So you get up and go to your mother, who thinks she is alive. That's my impression. But now I shall have to get myself out of this ditch. How joyfully I would vanish here, sinking deeper and deeper under the rains."
"James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself."
"She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time."
"The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye)."
"Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity."
"That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love."
"I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps."
"What is that unforgettable line?"
"Deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what."
"The only sin is the sin of being born."
"Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Vladimir: Yes, yes, we're magicians."
"What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening."
"Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss."
"How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it to the without, in order to benefit by the contrast."
"The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue."
"What is more true than anything else? To swim is true and to sink is true. One cannot speak any more of being, one must speak onlyof the mess."
"But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something."
"What I assert, deny, question, in the present, I still can. But mostly I shall use the various tenses of the past. For mostly I do not know, it is perhaps no longer so, it is too soon to know, I simply do not know, perhaps shall never know."
"As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places."
"I gave up before birth."