Quotes – Page 301 | Just Great DataBase

like a pathway through a forest, like a carpet for royalty, it shows me the way

I’ve always depended very heavily on the good opinion of others.

we developed a firm, practical feeling of solidarity, which grew, on the battlefield, into the best thing that the war produced – comradeship in arms.

She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them.

Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. It transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.

I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of terrible, terrible fall. . . . The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. . . . So they gave up looking.

His coming was in the nature of a welcome disturbance; it seemed to furnish a new direction for her emotions.

But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one.

I don’t, she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.

I can’t think of myself, my body, sometimes, without seeing the skeleton: how I must appear to an electron. A cradle of life, made of bones; and within, hazards, warped proteins, bad crystals jagged as glass.

It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power.

There is nothing louder than an American hotel; and, mind you, this was supposed to be a quiet, cozy, old-fashioned, homey place – ‘gracious living’ and all that stuff.

Let me repeat with quite force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow moving tall, with dark soft hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanour.

How long were you supposed to mourn, and what did they say? Make your life a tribute to the loved one.

I had always thought that wringing one’s hands was a fictional gesture — the obscure outcome, perhaps, of some medieval ritual; but as I took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate meditation, this was the gesture (look, Lord, at these chains!) that would have come nearest to the mute expression of my mood.

Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed. “It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.

My mother Thetis tells me that there are two ways in which I may meet my end. If I stay here and fight, I will not return alive but my name will live forever: whereas if I go home my name will die, but it will be long ere death shall take me.

I read about that in introduction to Psychology; that, and the chapter on caged rats who’d give themselves electric shocks for something to do And the one on the pigeons, trained to peck a button that made a grain of corn appear. Three groups of them: the first got one grain per peck, the second one grain every other peck, the third was random. When the man in charge cut off the grain, the first group gave up quite soon, the second group a little later. The third group never gave up. They’d peck themselves to death, rather than quit. Who knew what worked?

You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

It’s hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.