Quotes Myself (page 10)
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In one was, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely this reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.
Christopher Hitchens
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As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world- and finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should...
Albert Camus
You miss the whole point, Pastor. What I did was wrong, but I couldn't stop myself. Why couldn't I stop myself? Because of what I am. I wasn't born this way. I became a man with a lot of problems, not because of my DNA, but because of what society demanded. Lock ' em up. Punish the hell out of them. And if you make a few monsters along the way, to bad.
John Grisham
Formerly, when I was told to consider him wise, I kept trying to, and thought I was stupid myself because I was unable to perceive his wisdom; but as soon as I said to myself, he's stupid (only in a whisper of course), it all became quite clear! Don't you think so?'
'How malicious you are to-day!'
'Not at all. I have no choice. One of us is stupid, and you know it's impossible to say so of oneself.
Leo Tolstoy
I remember asking John, after Dusklands, what new project he had on the go. His answer was vague. 'There is always something or the other I am working on', he said. 'If I yield to the seduction of not working, what would I do with myself? What would there be to live for? I would have to shoot myself.
J. M. Coetzee
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All that I've done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I'd always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn't I.
Fernando Pessoa
The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes I dreamed of always began like this. I could lose myself forever in that singular little face, in the pessimism of her beautiful mouth. When I imagined these phrases cast in her voice, they were almost intolerably sweet; now, sitting right beside her, it was unthinkable that I should voice them myself.
Donna Tartt
I am dead because I have no desire, I have no desire because I think I possess, I think I possess because I do not try to give; Trying to give, I see that I have nothing, Seeing that I have nothing, I try to give myself, Trying to give myself, I see that I am nothing, Seeing that I am nothing, I desire to become, Desiring to become, I live.
Rene Daumal