Tina > Tina's Quotes

“What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you've had of perfection: why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? It feels like a betrayal of what you've been through. But it fades; you accept that certain compromises, closures, are required if you're to continue.”
― Salman Rushdie

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“We all owe death a life.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“You need a reason to be sad. You don't need a reason to be happy.”
― Louis Sachar, Sideways Stories from Wayside School

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“With how many things are we on the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

“A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

“So in our own poor hides and from our miserable comrades we learn the nature of satiety. Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“...you are strong only as long as you don't deprive people of everything. For a person you've taken everything from is no longer in your power. He's free all over again.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“Once again...welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before...”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Life did not stop, and one had to live.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair!”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“A Frenchman's self-assurance stems from his belief that he is mentally and physically irresistibly fascinating to both men and women. An Englishman's self-assurance is founded on his being a citizen of the best organized state in the world and on the fact that, as an Englishman, he always knows what to do, and that whatever he does as an Englishman is unquestionably correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets. A Russian is self-assured simply because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe in the possibility of knowing anything fully.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King