Jean-Paul Sartre
- nausea
Friday: Three o'clock. Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. An odd moment in the afternoon. Today it is intolerable.
Henry Emily
- The Final Speech
As for most of you, I believe there is peace and perhaps more waiting for you after the smoke clears. Although, for one of you, the darkest pit of Hell has opened to swallow you whole. So don't keep the Devil waiting, my friend.
John Green
- Auld Lang Syne
She would ask an audience to sing that song with her: "We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here." And although it's a profoundly nihilistic song written about the modernist hell of repetition, singing this song with Amy, I could always see the hope in it. It became a statement we are here - meaning that we are together, and not alone.
Samuel Beckett
- Molloy
I straightened myself and laid my hand on his shoulder, saying, "Patience, my child, patience." The awful thing in affairs of this kind is that when you have the will you do not have the way, and vice versa.
John Green
- End of the World
I'm reminded of something my religion professor Donald Rogan told me once: "Never predict the end of the world. You're almost certain to be wrong, and if you are right, no one will be around to congratulate you."
Flann O'Brien
- The Third Policeman
The gross and net result is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them, and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.
Fernando Pessoa
- The Book of Disquiet
Man should not be able to see his own face. Nothing is more terrible than that. Nature gave him the gift of being unable to see either his face or into his own eyes. He could only see his own face in the waters of rivers and lakes. Even the posture he had to adopt to do so was symbolic. He had to bend down, to lower himself, in order to suffer the ignominy of seeing his own face. The creator of the mirror poisoned the human soul.
Marianne Williamson
- Marianne 2020
My first call is to the prime minister of New Zealand, who said that her goal is to make New Zealand where it's the best place in the world for a child to grow up. And I would tell her: 'Girlfriend, you are so on.'.
Sara Quin
- High School
I wanted to tell her everything I knew about LA made me think of her: vast permanent things like the sun. How I'd imagined myself a thousand times living with her in the shabby apartment from the photograph she'd taped to her bedroom wall, surrounded by the pyramid of beautiful girls she'd lived and danced with the previous summer.
John McEnroe
- Never Have I Ever
"You're the girl whose dad died in front of her at a concert and became paralyzed." Devi couldn't believe that the major trauma of her life could be reduced to a single sentence, but there it was.
Oscar Wilde
- A Portrait of Dorian Gray
You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?
John Kennedy Toole
- A Confederacy of Dunces
Employers sense in me a denial of their values. They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century I loathe. This was true even when I worked for the New Orleans Public Library.