just literature quotes

“Life goes on. Hope rises and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain. The sound of music floats down a dark street. A young girl looks out a window and wishes she were married. A drunk sleeps under a bridge. It is tomorrow.”

“Tempted to put too much faith in the great male mind, remember this: It looked at cats and declared them gods. It looked at women and asked, Are they human? And, once that nut had been cracked: But do they have souls?”

“Bad luck alone does not embitter us that badly… nor does the feeling that our affairs might have been better managed move us out of range of ordinary disappointment; it is when we recognize that the loss has been caused in great part by others; that it needn’t have happened; that there is an enemy out there who has stolen our loaf, soured our wine, infected our book of splendid verse with filthy rhymes; then we are filled with resentment and would hang the villains from that bough we would have lounged in liquorous love beneath had the tree not been cut down by greedy and dim-witted loggers in the pay of the lumber interests. Watch out, then, watch out for us, be on your guard, look sharp, both ways, when we learn—we, in any numbers—when we find who is forcing us—wife, children, Commies, fat cats, Jews—to give up life in order to survive. It is this condition in men that makes them ideal candidates for the Party of the disappointed People.”

“Whatever may be noble and heroic in war is found in us, and whatever is evil and horrific in war is also found in us.”

“Some took a liking to him as a refined, intelligent and exceptional person, only to react with horror and disappointment on suddenly discovering the wolf in him. And this was inevitable because Harry, wishing his whole self to be loved, as everybody does, was for that very reason incapable of denying the wolf or concealing its existence from those whose affection meant a lot to him. There were, however, others who of all things loved the wolf in him, precisely the side of him that was free, wild, untameable, dangerous and strong. And they in turn were of course extraordinarily disappointed, indeed miserable, when the wild, wicked wolf suddenly turned out to be human too, still felt a strong desire to be kind and gentle, still wanted to listen to Mozart, read poetry and keep faith with the ideals of humanity. More than any others, these people were especially prone to react with anger and disappointment, and thus Steppenwolf transmitted to all the strangers whose lot it was to come into contact with him something of his own dual, divided nature.”

“Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.”

“I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable – but I always was so, only I never knew it!”

“By contrast with the first time they’d met, when she had felt herself so old but in fact had been so young, Karen now actually was old enough to understand that for Martin, there might have been no story at all. There might have been — for this person who’d not merely touched but deformed her — no sensation of contact at all. He might not recognize her. If he did, he might not recall a single detail of their past relationship. If he did, he might not recall the same details. If he did, he might not recall them in just the same way.”