Adam > Adam's Quotes

“Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.”
― E.E. Cummings

“What do you fear, lady?" [Aragorn] asked.
"A cage," [Éowyn] said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.”
― Lemony Snicket

“What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul”
― Victor Hugo , Les Misérables

“Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Be happy, but never satisfied.”
― Bruce Lee

“Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Suicide only really frightens those who are never tempted by it and never will be, for its darkness only welcomes those who are predestined to it.”
― Georges Bernanos, Mouchette

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo

“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.”
― Anne Sexton

“I like this place and could willingly waste my time in it.”
― William Shakespeare

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”
― François Rabelais

“It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“i mean talk about decadence," he declared, "how decadent can a society get? Look at it this way. This country's probably the psychiatric, psychoanalytical capital of the world. Old Freud himself could never've dreamed up a more devoted bunch of disciples than the population of the United States - isn't that right? Our whole damn culture is geared to it; it's the new religion; it's everybody's intellectual and spiritual sugar-tit. And for all that, look what happens when a man really does blow his top. Call the Troopers, get him out of sight quick, hustle him off and lock him up before he wakes the neighbors. Christ's sake, when it comes to any kind of showdown we're still in the Middle Ages. It's as if everybody'd made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception. The hell with reality! Let's have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let's all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality -- and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we'll all get busy and pretend it never happened.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“So it hadn’t been wrong or dishonest of her to say no this morning, when he asked if she hated him, any more than it had been wrong or dishonest to serve him the elaborate breakfast and to show the elaborate interest in his work, and to kiss him goodbye. The kiss, for that matter, had been exactly right—a perfectly fair, friendly kiss, a kiss for a boy you’d just met at a party, a boy who’d danced with you and made you laugh and walked you home afterwards, talking about himself all the way.

The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was ever to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear—until he was saying “I love you” and she was saying “Really, I mean it; you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met.” What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you’d started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying “I’m sorry, of course you’re right,” and “Whatever you think is best,” and “You’re the most wonderful and valuable thing in the world,” and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people. Then you discovered you were working at life the way the Laurel Players worked at The Petrified Forest, or the way Steve Kovick worked at his drums—earnest and sloppy and full of pretension and all wrong; you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and “We’ve got to be together on this thing” when you meant the very opposite; then you were breathing gasoline as if it were flowers and abandoning yourself to a delirium of love under the weight of a clumsy, grunting, red-faced man you didn’t even like—Shep Campbell!—and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn’t know who you were. (p.416-7)”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“Let this hell be our heaven.”
― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come

“Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.”
― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend