Archive

Quotes

Refrigerators and television sets, or even rockets sent to the moon, do not change man into God.

—Czesław Miłosz, 1960

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

—Edith Wharton, 1924

Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.

—Harriet Doerr, 1978

In America, everybody is, but some are more than others.

—Gertrude Stein, 1937

O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.

—William Shakespeare, c. 1599

Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It’s the glory of the sea that has turned my head.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883

Understanding is a very dull occupation.

—Gertrude Stein, 1937

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.

—Will Self, 1994

The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chawing a hunk of melon in the dust.

—Elizabeth Bowen, 1955

I am ill every time it blows hard, and nothing but my enthusiastic love for the profession keeps me one hour at sea.

—Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1804

A broken friendship may be soldered but will never be sound.

—Thomas Fuller, 1732

The more religious a country is, the more crimes are committed in it.

—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1817

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

—Hermann Hesse, 1950