Is It Cold In There

"Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read." Jorge Luis Borges

[hipsterik]

One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic

Robert Musil

[hipsterik]

I believe God is a bigger man than me, but sometimes I think that I can fight Him

Noah Gundersen, Moss on a Rolling Stone

[hipsterik]

Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night.

Franz Kafka

[hipsterik]

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, 'What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.'

Jorges Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse

[hipsterik]

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC

Kurt Vonnegut

[hipsterik]

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

Kurt Vonnegut

[hipsterik]

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

Franz Kafka

[hipsterik]

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

Franz Kafka

[hipsterik]

It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands

[hipsterik]

An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. 'Can they be brought together?' This is a practical question. We must get down to it. 'I despise intelligence' really means: 'I cannot bear my doubts.'

Albert Camus

[hipsterik]

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

Albert Camus

[hipsterik]

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.

Albert Camus, The Fall

[hipsterik]

If you but knew the flames that burn in me which I attempt to beat down with my reason.

Alexander Pushkin

[hipsterik]

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

Jorge Luis Borges

[hipsterik]

Comfortable shoes and the freedom to leave are the two most important things in life.

Shel Silverstein

[hipsterik]

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

Vladimir Nabokov

[hipsterik]

Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.

Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions