Shannon > Shannon's Quotes

“You must not pay too much attention to opinions. The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“This fall I think you're riding for—it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Mothers are all slightly insane.”
― J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it will begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that won’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“There is always something left to love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Active, small, severe, that woman of unbreakable nerves who at no moment in her life had been heard to sing seemed to be everywhere, from dawn until quite late at night, always pursued by the soft whispering of her stiff starched petticoats.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Ursula wondered if it was not preferable to lie down once and for all in her grave and let them throw the earth over her, and she asked God, without fear, if He really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and fortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and alow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out of her heart thee infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century if conformity.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He drifted about, with no ties of affection, with no ambitions, like a wandering star in Ursula's planetary system.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“...all he had left was the marvelous gift of being able to remember it without bitterness or repentance.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“His fervor for the written word was an interweaving of solemn respect and gossipy irreverence.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“In that Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe, secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was almost impossible to sleep because of the noise of the red ants, Aureliano, and Amaranta Úrsula were the only happy beings, and the most happy on the face of the earth.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Here is time held in suspension. Yesterday pickled. Eternity in a jar.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“And I pray one prayer--I repeat it till my tongue stiffens--Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you--haunt me, then!...Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“Here's the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit. It? I ask. Yeah, It. God ain't a he or a she, but a It. But what do it look like? I ask. Don't look like nothing, she say. It ain't a picture show. It ain't something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you cam feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found it.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater