Am Quotes (page 70)
I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic? in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
Anais Nin
I am the nothingness around which this movement spins, the only reason it spins, not that the center exists except in the fact that all circles have a center. I, really I, am the well without walls, but with the sliminess of its walls, the center of everything with the nothingness around it.
Fernando Pessoa
Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the point of exasperation, yet I would not care to be in his place as he is now (though I will not stop envying him. No, no; anyway the underground life is more advantageous!) There, at any rate, one can-- bah! But after all, even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself as surely as two times two makes four, that it is not at all underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I long but which I cannot...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
No longer mourn for me when I am dead. Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell. Give warning to the world that I am fled. From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell; Nay, if you read this line, remember not. The hand that writ it; for I love you so, That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then would make you woe.
William Shakespeare
Though frankly… Tarnapol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached from the memoir-ist – his revelations coming to seem like still another “useful fiction,” and not because I am telling lies. I am trying to keep to the facts. Maybe all I’m saying is that words, being words, only approximate the real thing, and so no matter how close I come, I only come close.
Philip Roth
For I have known them all already, known them all -Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;I know the voices dying with a dying fallBeneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume? And I have known the eyes already, known them all -The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,Then how should I beginTo spit out all the butt-ends of my...
T. S. Eliot
I will vouch for him before the seat of Denethor,' said Gandalf. 'And as for valour, that cannot be computed by stature. He has passed through more battles and perils than you have, Ingold, though you be twice his height; and he comes now from the storming of Isengard, of which we bear tidings, and great weariness is on him, or I would wake him. His name is Peregrin, a very valiant man.'
Man?' said Ingold dubiously; and the others laughed.
Man!' cried Pippin, now thoroughly roused. 'Man!...
J. R. R. Tolkien