The best Book Quotes (Page 2)

Humanity seems doomed to do more evil than good. The greatest ideal on earth is human love.

The love of freedom is native to every human being and every nation, and cannot be suppressed in the long term. History teaches us that tyranny has never endured.

And now I was lonelier, I supposed, than anyone else in the world. Even Defoe's creation, Robinson Crusoe, the prototype of the ideal solitary, could hope to meet another human being. Crusoe cheered himself by thinking that such a thing could happen any day, and it kept him going. But if any of the people now around me came near I would need to run for it and hide in mortal terror. I had to be alone, entirely alone, if I wanted to live.

Why did this war have to happen at all? Because humanity had to be shown where its godlessness was taking it.

War. There was now no point in a war that might once have been justified as a search for free subsistence and living space – it had degenerated into vast, inhuman mass slaughter, negating all cultural values.

For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.

I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.

I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

There is prodigious strength in sorrow and despair.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Mr. Lorry knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew her by this time to be, beneath the service of her eccentricity, one of those unselfish creatures—found only among women—who will, for pure love and admiration, bind themselves willing slaves, to youth when they have lost it, to beauty that they never had, to accomplishments that they were never fortunate enough to gain, to bright hopes that never shone upon their own sombre lives.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can't get any better, it can.

To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I'.

'My dear fellow, who will let you?'
'That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?'

Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.

But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long.

Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, 'Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.' Man bursts into tears. Says, 'But doctor...I am Pagliacci.

Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.

A life without love is like a tree without fruit.

'I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?' She studied him, her eyes grave. 'Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.'

Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it started.

The good thing about being old, is you don’t have to worry about dying young.

Death was no less a miracle than birth.

No great thing is created suddenly.

FEAR stands for fuck everything and run.

FEAR stands for face everything and recover.

He had come to believe that life was a series of ironic ambushes.

Sometimes you had to know. Sometimes you had to see.

'Want a Coke?' Abra asked. 'Sugar solves lots of problems, that’s what I think.'

We're all dying. The world’s just a hospice with fresh air.

You can't be deep without a surface.

'I want what we all want,' said Carl. 'To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.'

Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen.

To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.

Of course when you were running with the bottom dogs, what you mostly saw were paws, claws, and assholes.

Someday I'd change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.

Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut?

How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do.

There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.

I'm always serious. That's the tragedy of my life.

Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.

Prince's music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger.

The wind was picking up off the ocean now and the whole coastal scene had a bleak, abandoned look, as though Maine in November really belonged to the ragged gulls who wheeled over the sun.

The marks humans leave are too often scars.