In Time Quotes (page 180)
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I need but say that my most vivid impression in that respect was a mere trifle: one day, on Million Street in St. Petersburg, a truck packed with jolly rioters made a clumsy but accurate swerve so as to deliberately squash a passing cat which remained lying there, as a perfectly flat, neatly ironed, black rag (only the tail still belonged to a cat -- it stood upright, and the tip, I think, still moved). At the time this struck me with some deep occult meaning, but I have since have occasion...
Vladimir Nabokov
For instance, supposing that the planet earth were not a sphere but a gigantic coffee table,
how much difference in everyday life would that make? Granted, this is a pretty
farfetched example; you can't rearrange facts of life so freely. Still, picturing the planet
earth, for convenience sake, as a gigantic coffee table does in fact help clear away the
clutter—those practically pointless contingencies such as gravity and the international
dateline and the equator, those nagging details that...
Haruki Murakami
We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a nice love-affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of police, but I've never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser. We say to ourselves: it'll be better under a new tsar, and in two hundred years it'll still be better, and nobody tries to make this good time come tomorrow. On the whole, life gets more and more complex every day and moves on its own sweet will, and people get more and more stupid, and get...
Anton Chekhov
I found a Bill Evans record in the bookcase and was listening to it while drying my hair when I realized that it was the record I had played in Naoko's room on the night of her birthday, the night she cried and I took her in my arms. That had happened only six months earlier, but it felt like something from a much remoter past. Maybe it felt that way because I had thought about it so often-too often, to the point where it had distorted my sense of time.
Haruki Murakami
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin...
Robert Kennedy
I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.
R. Buckminster Fuller
I think a lot of times when you meet someone you feel like you need to appear like you're not interested in them so that they'll be more interested in you. But what happens when you start showing him that you actually like him? What's he gonna do then? Play the tape forward; how do you keep a guy like that? I don't want to sign up for that. I just don't want to end up in a relationship that isn't fair ever again.
Taylor Swift
The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation. I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine. That is , by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable. The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair. He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the...
Arthur Koestler
It was the history of the family, written by Melquades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred yea rs ahead of time. He had written it in Sanskrit, which was his mother tongue, and he had encoded the even lines in the private cipher o f the Emperor Augustus and the odd ones in a La cedemonian military code.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
At times it seems as if arranging to have no commitment of any kind to anyone would be a special freedom. But in fact the whole idea works in reverse. The most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one's self. Some come to realize this after they are in the nursing home.
John D. MacDonald