Quotes to inspire and reflect

Dieu est mort!

[ Explaining why he walked a lobster on a leash in the gardens of the Palais Royal :] I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gnaw upon one’s monadic privacy like dogs do.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

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

I want

The trouble with a kitten is

There was a young belle of old Natchez

I’m a Stranger Here Myself.

Bankers Are Just Like Anybody Else, Except Richer.

Every Englishman is convinced of one thing, viz.:

Senator Smoot is an institute

Candy

Gird up your l—ns,

The Bronx?

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.

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

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”?

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.

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

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

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.”

Rome-Berlin axis.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

They shoot the white girl first.

This is not a story to pass on.

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

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

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.

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

Dancing is wonderful training for girls, it’s the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.

When Abraham Lincoln was murdered

Thunder on the Left.

[ Drawing his beard aside before placing his head on the block :] This hath not offended the king.

They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.