Being There Quotes (page 263)
-
-
-
He yearned to know nothing more about himself, to find peace, to be dead. If only lightning could come and kill him. If only a tiger could come and devour him. If only there were a wine, a poison that could bring him a stupor, bring him sleep and oblivion and no more awakening. Was there any filth with which he had not soiled himself, any sin or folly he had not committed, any spiritual bleakness with which he had not burdened himself? Was it still possible to go on living? Was it possible to...
Herman Hesse
The best thing would be to break your neck, but you'd probably just break your leg and then you couldn't do a thing. You'd yell at the top of your lungs, but nobody; d hear you, and you couldn't expect anybody to find you, and you'd have centipedes and spiders crawling all over you, and the bones of the ones who died before are scattered all around you, and it's dark and soggy, and way overhead there's this tiny, tiny circle of light like a winter moon. You die there in this place, little...
Haruki Murakami
One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. …[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly....
H. L. Mencken
here also forgiving does not mean excusing. Many people seem to think it does. They think that if you ask them to forgive someone who has cheated or bullied them you are trying to make out that there was really no cheating or bullying. But if that were so, there would be nothing to forgive. (This doesn't mean that you must necessarily believe his next promise. It does mean that you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart - every wish to humiliate or hurt him...
C. S. Lewis
You are aware of only one unrest; Oh, never learn to know the other! Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast, And one is striving to forsake its brother. Unto the world in grossly loving zest, With clinging tendrils, one adheres; The other rises forcibly in quest. Of rarefied ancestral spheres. If there be spirits in the air. That hold their sway between the earth and sky, Descend out of the golden vapors there. And sweep me into iridescent life. Oh, came a magic cloak into my hands. To...
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Pandas and rain forests are never mentioned when it comes to the millions of people taking joyrides in their Range Rovers. Rather, it's the little things we're strong-armed into conserving. At a chain coffee bar in San Francisco, I saw a sign near the cream counter that read NAPKINS COME FROM TREES - CONSERVE! In case you missed the first sign, there was a second one two feet away, reading YOU WASTE NAPKINS - YOU WASTE TREES!!! The cups, of course, are also made of paper, yet there's no...
David Sedaris
He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lorship's wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?
Kazuo Ishiguro
If there's anything I'm proud of in my work--it's not that I draw better; there's so many better graphic artists than me--or that I write better, no. It's--and I'm not saying I know the truth, because what the hell is that? But what I got from Ruth and Dave, a kind of fierce honesty, to not let the kid down, to not let the kid get punished, to not suffer the child to be dealt with in a boring, simpering, crushing-of-the-spirit kind of way.
Maurice Sendak
On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees—where there are any trees—all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks . . . I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair,—bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save...
Lafcadio Hearn