Quotes to inspire and reflect

Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.

Dieu est mort!

I want

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

You are like nobody else since I love you.

I have gone marking the atlas of your body with crosses of fire.

The only compliment he ever paid her was You sweat less than any fat girl I know.

The trouble with a kitten is

There was a young belle of old Natchez

I’m a Stranger Here Myself.

Every Englishman is convinced of one thing, viz.:

Bankers Are Just Like Anybody Else, Except Richer.

Senator Smoot is an institute

Candy

The Bronx?

Gird up your l—ns,

Worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one has been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here.

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.

Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.

One of those “Two Cultures” is really nothing but utilitarian technology; the other is B-grade novels, ideological fiction, popular art. Who cares if there exists a gap between such “physics” and such “humanities”?

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

Like so many aging college people, Pnin had long since ceased to notice the existence of students on the campus.

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”

Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

[ To a railway stationmaster :] We must leave exactly on time. . . . From now on everything must function to perfection.

Rome-Berlin axis.

War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it.

On ne Badine pas avec l’Amour .

The number of portraits one saw of [Emperor Franz Joseph] was almost as great as the number of inhabitants of his realms. . . . Believing in his existence was rather like seeing certain stars although they ceased to exist thousands of years ago.

Never mind the bottle, as long as it gets you drunk.

There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften .

Thus anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.

In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

Passion, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting disgust, and . . . music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear.

When a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. . . . When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

The two valets sit at the top of the table, but at least I have the honor of being placed above the cooks.

I like to enjoy myself, but rest assured that I can be as serious as anyone else can.

They shoot the white girl first.

I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician.

[ Of Bill Clinton :] This is our first black President.

This is not a story to pass on.

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.

It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

I know what every colored woman in this country is doing. . . . Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.