Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Brothers Karamazov
I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves in spring. I love the blue sky. I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I've long ceased perhaps to have faith in them. Yet from habit one's heart prizes them.
Philip K. Dick
In a sense, the better you adapt to school the less your chances are of later adapting to the actual world. So I figure, the worse you adapt to school, the better you will be able to handle reality when you finally manage to get loose at last from school, if that ever happens. But I guess I have what in the military they call a "poor attitude," which means "shape up or ship out." I always elected to ship out.
Philip K. Dick
"They found the remains of an organism advanced several thousand times over what we are," Charley said. "And evidently could create habitable worlds and populate them with living organisms, derived from itself. But that doesn't prove it was God."
Philip K. Dick
- The Dark-Haired Girl
A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.
Leo Tolstoy
Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.
John Irving
- A Prayer for Owen Meany
Ever since the Christmas of '53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.
D.H. Lawrence
When along the pavement, palpitating flames of life, people flicker around me, I forget my bereavement, the gap in the great constellation, the place where a star used to be.
George Eliot
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.
Abraham Lincoln
In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all and it often comes with bitter agony. Perfect relief is not possible except with time. You cannot now believe that you will ever feel better. But this is not true. You are sure to be happy again. Knowing this, truly believing it will make you less miserable now. I have had enough experience to make this statement.
