Quotes Myself (page 96)
I read and am liberated. I acquire objectivity. I cease being myself and so scattered. And what I read, instead of being like a nearly invisible suit that sometimes oppresses me, is the external world’s tremendous and remarkable clarity, the sun that sees everyone, the moon that splotches the still earth with shadows, the wide expanses that end in the sea, the blackly solid trees whose tops greenly wave, the steady peace of ponds on farms, the terraced slopes with their paths overgrown by...
Fernando Pessoa
This is tantamount to saying, "My hand is weak. I cannot draw a straight line,—that is, a line which will be the shortest line between two given points,—and so, in order to make it more easy for myself, I, intending to draw a straight, will choose for my model a crooked line." The weaker my hand, the greater the need that my model should be perfect.
Leo Tolstoy
Occasionally I was so much better that I could go out; but the streets used to put me in such a rage that I would lock myself up for days rather than go out, even if I were well enough to do so! I could not bear to see all those preoccupied, anxious-looking creatures continuously surging along the streets past me! Why are they always anxious? What is the meaning of their eternal care and worry? It is their wickedness, their perpetual detestable malice—that's what it is—they are all full of...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
I believe that before anything else I'm a human being -- just as much as you are... or at any rate I shall try to become one. I know quite well that most people would agree with you, Torvald, and that you have warrant for it in books; but I can't be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what's in books. I must think things out for myself and try to understand them.
Henrik Ibsen
Even for those who dislike champagne, myself among them, there are two champagnes one can't refuse: Dom Perignon and the even superior Cristal, which is bottled in a natural-colored glass that displays its pale blaze, a chilled fire of such prickly dryness that, swallowed, seems not to have been swallowed at all, but instead to have turned to vapors on the tongue and burned there to one damp sweet ash.
Truman Capote