Max Frisch

Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.

We asked for workers. We got people instead.

It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

A joke is a good camouflage. Next best comes sentiment... But the best camouflage of all - in my opinion - is the plain and simple truth. Because nobody ever believes it.

You can put anything into words, except your own life.

When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.

We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes--or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers.

If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.

Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.

The demand that we love our neighbor as ourselves contains as an axiom the demand that we shall love ourselves, shall accept ourselves as we were created.

Dubravka Ugrešić

Her mind still worked, her feet still moved, she could walk, though only with the help of a walker, but she did walk, and she was a human being who knew for certain that beans are best in salad and that old age is a terrible calamity.

The invisibility in which we live next to one another is appalling, Kukla thought.

The foreign country is where no one greets us upon arrival . . .

You're as handsome as Apollo, you're not picking your nose, you're not stingy and you're not talking too much. There's nothing at all with you, announced Pupa in the tone of a doctor who was a hundred per cent sure of her diagnosis.

Why did you leave your homeland? Because for the child who sleeps like an angel in other languages, my people say that he sleeps like a slaughtered one!

No one is interested in real victims, or real criminals. Not local courts, not their fellow citizens, not publishers, and not readers. Everyone simply refuses to believe them. An imaginary crime is much more convincing; reality is too real. They can only identify with invented crime, only paper evil can excite them.

Ismail Kadare

I consider I've had a good day when, among the lines I've written, I've produced from my innermost core what I call 'the appearance of the pearl.' That could refer to a discovery, a sense of harmonious cohesiveness, or something like that.

The great universal literature has always had a tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on chaotic mythology, like a tyrant.

Literature led me to freedom, not the other way round.

The founding father of Albanian literature is the nineteenth-century writer Naim Frasheri. Without having the greatness of Dante or Shakespeare, he is nonetheless the founder, the emblematic character. He wrote long epic poems, as well as lyrical poetry, to awaken the national consciousness of Albania.

In general, literature is a natural adversary of totalitarianism. Tyrannical governments all view literature in the same way: as their enemy. I lived for a long time in a totalitarian state, and I know firsthand that horror.

Jennifer Clement

Don't ever pray for love and health, Mother said. Or money. If God hears what you really want he will not give it to you. Guaranteed. When my father left my mother said, get down on your knees and pray for spoons.

He stepped on my shadow. I could not walk. And then I could not breathe. I did not know what had happened until it happened. It was like trying to stop the rain.

Don't cry over anything that can't cry over you.

You think you get a dose of tragedy and that's that. You think it can't get any worse and that you're saved now. But tragedy is not like medicine. You don't get a dose like a pill or a spoonful. Tragedy always kicks in.

If you were quiet about something then it never happened. Someone would write a song about it for sure. Everything you’re not supposed to know about, or talk about, eventually turned up in a song. 

Dreaming is cheap. It doesn't cost a thing. In dreams you don't have to pay the bills or pay the rent. In dreams you can buy a house and be loved back.

Ernest Poole

And there came to him a feeling which he had often had before in many different places--that he himself was a part of all this, the great, blind, wistful soul of mankind, which had been here before he was born and would be here when he was dead--still groping, yearning, struggling upward, on and on--to something distant as the sun. And still would he be part of it all, through the eager lives of his children.

It's hard to keep up with your children,' he said. 'It means keeping up with everything new. And you stay in your rut and then it's too late. Before you know it you are old.

Queer, how a man can neglect his children, as I have done ... when the thing he wants most in life is to see each one . . . happy.

I wonder if it won't be the same with the children as it has been with us. No matter how long each one of them lives, won't their lives feel to them unfinished like ours, only just beginning? I wonder how far they will go. And then their children will grow up and it will be the same with them. Unfinished lives. Oh, dearie, what children all of us are.

When the women get the vote, we'll spend more money on the children.

Edith Wharton

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it.

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.

Life is always either a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.

Each time you happen to me all over again.

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.

I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.

Booth Tarkington

Gossip is never fatal until it is denied. Gossip goes on about every human being alive and about all the dead that are alive enough to be remembered, and yet almost never does any harm until some defender makes a controversy. Gossip's a nasty thing, but it's sickly, and if people of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough.

Mothers see the angel in us because the angel is there. If it's shown to the mother, the son has got an angel to show, hasn't he? When a son cuts somebody's throat the mother only sees it's possible for a misguided angel to act like a devil - and she's entirely right about that!

There aren't any old times. When times are gone they're not old, they're dead! There aren't any times but new times!

"I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles," he said. "With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls.”

Edna Ferber

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.

But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

It sounds so far away and different. I like different places. I like any places that isn't here.

Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.

Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.

Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.

Whoever said love conquers all was a fool. Because almost everything conquers love - or tries to.

Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.

A closed mind is a dying mind.

Josephine Winslow Johnson

The earth was overwhelmed with beauty and indifferent to it, and I went with a heart ready to crack for its unbearable loveliness.

What is sanity, after all, except the control of madness.

The things we felt most are hardest to put into words. Hate is always easier to speak of than love. How shall I make love go through the sieve of words and come out something besides a pulp?

Lord make me satisfied with small things. Make me content to live on the outside of life. God make me love the rind!

I cannot believe this is the end. Nor can I believe that death is more than the blindness of those living. And if this is only the consolation of a heart in its necessity, or that easy faith born of despair, it does not matter, since it gives us courage somehow to face the mornings. Which is as much as the heart can ask at times.

But only in mad people fear goes on constant night and day, wearing one ditch in the mind that all thoughts must travel in.

Most people have the blindness of new-born things - a not-incurable blindness, the sight being there but its use not known.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.

Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.

A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.

We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.

Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.

Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer.

"Good" is what helps us or at least does not hinder. "Evil" is whatever harms us or interferes with us, according to our own selfish standards.

Who owns Cross Creek? The red-birds, I think, more than I, for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages..It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed, but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers its sesonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers, and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time. . .