Milan Kundera

Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

No love can survive muteness.

The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated.

What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. 

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? 

Optimism is the opium of the people.

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain … Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;

But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat — the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends —
It gives a lovely light.

Many a bard's untimely death
Lends unto his verses breath;

Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all.

It's little I know what's in my heart,
What's in my mind it's little I know,
But there's that in me must up and start,
And it's little I care where my feet go.

William Carlos Williams

A man isn’t a block that remains stationary though the psychologists treat him so — and most take an insane pride in believing it. … The arts have a complexrelation to society. The poet isn’t a fixed phenomenon, no more is his work.

One thing I am convinced more and more is true and that is this: the only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.

It's a strange world made up of disappointments for the most part.

Why do we live? Most of us need the very thing we never ask for. 

Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.

Well —
all things turn bitter in the end
whether you choose the right or
the left way
    and —
dreams are not a bad thing.

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches —
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter.

Julia Ward Howard

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

Life passes, but the conditions of life do not.

Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms,
To deck our girls for gay delights!
The crimson flower of battle blooms,
And solemn marches fill the nights.

Arise, all women who have hearts!

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."

I think nothing is religion which puts one individual absolutely above others, and surely nothing is religion which puts one sex above another.

James Jones

I write to reach eternity.

It will say just about everything I have ever had to say, or will ever have to say, on the human condition of war and what it means to us, as against what we claim it means to us.

Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them, without denying with them the purpose of your own existence...

This is the song of the men who have no place, played by a man who has never had a place, and can therefore play it.

This song is Reality. Remember? Surely you remember?

I'm an American, and always will be. I happen to love that big, awkward, sprawling country very much — and its big, awkward, sprawling people.

There's only a thin red line between the sane and the mad.

Sometimes the air is awfully clear here. You can look off to sea and see the soft, warm, raggedy roof of clouds stretching on and on and on. It almost seems as if you can look right on into eternity.

If I get it, no one will ever know to what heights I might have gone as a writer. Maybe if you wrote about the promise that was there, all wouldn't be lost.

Thomas Mann

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.

We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.

Life is not the means for the achievement of an esthetic ideal of perfection; on the contrary, the work is an ethical symbol of life.

I have an epic, not a dramatic nature. My disposition and my desires call for peace to spin my thread, for a steady rhythm in life and art.

Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

It is not good when people no longer believe in war. Pretty soon they no longer believe in many other things which they absolutely must believe in if they are to be decent men.

There is an artistry so deep, so primordial and elemental, that no yearning seems to it sweeter and more worthy of tasting than that for the raptures of common-placeness.

Guy de Maupassant

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.

I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.

The need of work is in me.

Love is always love, come whence it may.

For several days in succession fragments of a defeated army had passed through the town.

he same thing happens whenever the established order of things is upset, when security no longer exists, when all those rights usually protected by the law of man or of Nature are at the mercy of unreasoning, savage force.

The girl was one of those pretty and charming young creatures who sometimes are born, as if by a slip of fate, into a family of clerks.

We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs ... of our barbarous ancestors.

Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.

André Gide

Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself — and thus make yourself indispensable.

Sin is whatever obscures the soul.

There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles—wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.

True intelligence very readily conceives of an intelligence superior to its own; and this is why truly intelligent men are modest.

It seems to me that had I not known Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or Freud or X or Z, I should have thought just as I did, and that I found in them rather an authorization than an awakening. Above all, they taught me to cease doubting, to cease fearing my thoughts, and to let those thoughts lead me to those lands that were not uninhabitable because after all I found them already there.

No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.

One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.

Lee Child

Long experience had taught me that absolute silence is the best way. Say something, and it can be misheard. Misunderstood. Misinterpreted. It can get you convicted. It can get you killed. Silence upsets the arresting officer. He has to tell you silence is your right but he hates it if you exercise that right.

I have the 'thing' worked out — the trick or the surprise or the pivotal fact. Then I just start somewhere and let the story work itself out.

I thought: should I be worried? I was under arrest. In a town where I'd never been before. Apparently for murder. But I knew two things. First, they couldn't prove something had happened if it hadn't happened. And second, I hadn't killed anybody. Not in their town, and not for a long time, anyway.

He had no living relatives anywhere capable of leaving him a fortune in a will. He owed no money. He had never stolen anything, never cheated anybody. Never fathered any children. He was on as few pieces of paper as it was possible for a human being to get. He was just about invisible.

Suicide bombers are easy to spot. They give out all kinds of telltale signs. Mostly because they're nervous. By definition they're all first-timers.

"Why not go live on the beach?"
"These things are a way of keeping score. I'm sure you have your own way of keeping score."
I nodded. "I compare the numbers of answers I get to the number of questions I ask."
"And how are you doing with that?"
"Lifetime average is close to a hundred per cent."

A. A. Milne

I wrote somewhere once that the third-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking.

When I was One,
I had just begun.
When I was Two,
I was nearly new.
When I was Three
I was hardly me.
When I was Four,
I was not much more.
When I was Five,
I was just alive.
But now I am Six,
I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.

When we asked Pooh what the opposite of an Introduction was, he said "The what of a what?" which didn't help us as much as we had hoped, but luckily Owl kept his head and told us that the Opposite of an Introduction, my dear Pooh, was a Contradiction; and, as he is very good at long words, I am sure that that's what it is.

Piglet looked up, and looked away again. And he felt so Foolish and Uncomfortable that he had almost decided to run away to Sea and be a Sailor, when suddenly he saw something.