Only Quotes (page 578)
Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.
Franz Kafka
Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.
Marcel Proust
![Ralph Ellison quote: "What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was..."](/pic/289853/600x316/quotation-ralph-ellison-what-and-how-much-had-i-lost-by-trying-to-do-only.jpg)
This is our dilemma--either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste--or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. [. . .] Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.
C. S. Lewis
![J. D. Salinger quote: "It's not too bad when the sun's out, but the sun only comes..."](/pic/289813/600x316/quotation-j-d-salinger-its-not-too-bad-when-the-suns-out-but-the-sun.jpg)
![Marcel Proust quote: "my house contains every useless thing in the world. it lacks..."](/pic/289808/600x316/quotation-marcel-proust-my-house-contains-every-useless-thing-in-the.jpg)
![Langston Hughes quote: "the only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then..."](/pic/289785/600x316/quotation-langston-hughes-the-only-way-to-get-a-thing-done-is-to-start-to.jpg)
Cutangle: While I'm still confused and uncertain, it's on a much higher plane, d'you see, and at least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe. Treatle: I hadn't looked at it like that, but you're absolutely right. He's really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance. They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.
Terry Prachett
Paradise is not a garden of bliss and changeless perfection where the lions lie down like lambs (what would they eat?) and the angels and cherubim and seraphim rotate in endless idiotic circles, like clockwork, about an equally inane and ludicrous -- however roseate -- unmoved mover. That particular painted fantasy of a realm beyond time and space which Aristotle and the church fathers tried to palm off on us has met, in modern times, only neglect and indifference passing on into oblivion it...
Edward Abbey
![Edith Wharton quote: "In the summer New York was the only place in which one could..."](/pic/289704/600x316/quotation-edith-wharton-in-the-summer-new-york-was-the-only-place-in.jpg)
So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.
Stephen King