Dickens

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

“The idea that history might have copied history is mind-boggling enough; that history should copy literature is inconceivable.”

The Devil Wears Prada.

Monty Python's Life of Brian.

“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”

“My entire life flashed before my eyes in the worst way possible, my mind refilling itself with all my lame memories, every little thing that had brought me to where I was. I’d try to remember something else — a better version, a happy story, maybe, or just an equally lame but different life that would at least be refreshing in its digressions — but it never worked. I was always still me. Sometimes I woke up with my face wet with tears. The only times I cried, in fact, were when I was pulled out of that nothingness, when the alarm on my cell phone went off.”

“And there it was again, that useless, human blame two people will toss between each other when they become too tired or weak to carry the weight of love.”

“You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.”

“Customs, rites, myths, and taboo are a language. As in language, where the sounds which make up words are, taken in themselves, meaningless, so the parts of a custom or a rite or a myth (according to Lévi-Strauss) are meaningless in themselves. When analyzing the Oedipus myth, he insists that the parts of the myth (the lost child, the old man at the crossroad, the marriage with the mother, the blinding, etc.) mean nothing. Only when put together in the total context do the parts have a meaning — the meaning that a logical model has.”

“Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”

“Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two.”

“He is hardly ever happy in the place where he is, something in him is already moving forward to the next place, and yet he is never going towards something, always away, away.”

“He’s no one. And for a person who is no one to become someone is more important than anything else.”

“Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.”

“It’s a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind.”

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

“Joy, anger, grief, delight, worry, regret, fickleness, inflexibility, modesty, willfulness, candor, insolence — music from empty holes, mushrooms springing up in dampness, day and night replacing each other before us, and no one knows where they sprout from. Let it be! Let it be! [It is enough that] morning and evening we have them, and they are the means by which we live. Without them, we would not exist; without us, they would have nothing to take hold of.”