Meanness Quotes (page 238)
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What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole.
Friedrich Nietzsche
She's afraid to tell me anything important, knowing I'll only turn around and write about it. In my mind, I'm like a friendly junkman, building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there, but my family's started to see things differently. Their personal lives are the so-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up, and they're sick of it. More and more often their stories begin with the line "You have to swear you'll never repeat this." I always promise, but it's generally...
David Sedaris
One always has to know when a stage comes to an end. If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through. Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters? whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.
Paulo Coelho
If truth in hearts that perish. Could move the powers on high, I think the love I bear you. Should make you not to die. Sure, sure, if stedfast meaning, If single thought could save, The world might end to-morrow, You should not see the grave. This long and sure-set liking, This boundless will to please,-Oh, you should live for ever. If there were help in these. But now, since all is idle, To this lost heart be kind, Ere to a town you journey Where friends are ill to find.
A. E. Housman
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.
Milan Kundera
Children, you are the future,' he said, and today I realize he did not mean it the way it sounded. The reason children are the future is not that they will one day be grownups. No, the reason is that mankind is moving more and more in the direction of infancy, and childhood is the image of the future.
Milan Kundera