Keeping Quotes (page 40)
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enjoying a tranquillity in which I
won’t write the works I don’t write now, and to keep on
not writing them I’ll come up with even better excuses
than the ones I use today to elude myself. Or I’ll be in an
institution for paupers, happy in my utter defeat, mixed
up with the rabble of would-be geniuses who were no more than beggars with dreams, thrown in with the
anonymous throng of those who didn’t have strength enough to conquer nor renunciation enough to conquer enough to conquer nor...
Fernando Pessoa
Legally, Moosbrugger's case could be summed up in-a sentence. Hewas one of those borderline cases in law and forensic medicineknown even to the layman as a case of diminished responsibility. These unfortunates typically suffer not only substandard healthbut also have a substandard disease, Nature has a peculiar prefer-ence for producing such people in droves. Natura non fecit saltus, she makes no jumps but prefers gradual transitions; even on thegrand scale she keeps the world in a...
Robert Musil
Driving home, I heard the explosion and thought it was a new story born. But, Adrian, it’s the same old story, whispered past the same false teeth. How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt? How can we imagine a new alphabet when the old jumps off billboards down into our stomachs? Adrian, what did you say? I want to rasp into sober cryptology and say something dynamic but tonight is my laundry night. How do we imagine a...
Sherman Alexie
I am fortunately an entirely handsome devil and appear even younger than twenty-nine. I look like a clean cut youth, a boy next door, and a good egg, and my mother stated at one time that I have the face of a heaven's angel. I have the eyes of an attractive marsupial, and I have baby-soft and white skin, and a fair complexion. I do not even have to shave, and I have finely styled hair without any of dandruff's unsightly itching or flaking. I keep my hair perfectly groomed, neat, and short at...
David Foster Wallace
Ozzie Boone... insists that I keep the tone light in these biographical manuscripts. He believes that pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative. Ozzie counsels me that melancholy is a self-indulgent form of sorrow. By writing in an unrelievedly dark mode, he warns, the writer risks culturing darkness in his heart, becoming the very thing that he decries.
Dean Koontz
He that hangs himself is a virgin: virginity murders itself, and should be buried in highways, out of all sanctified limit, as a desperate offendress against nature. Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese, consumes itself to the very paring, and so dies with feeding his own stomach. Besides, virginity is peevish, proud, idle, made of self-love, which is the most inhibited sin in the canon. Keep it not; you cannot choose but lose by’t! Out with’t! within the year it will make itself two,...
William Shakespeare
