useful quotations

only quote from those people who write better than you do. here are some starting points.

some of these come from works that i teach in school, others from a variety of literary sources. when i find a quote that may be useful in writing, i put it here.

enjoy…

 

“Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round. ”
David Lodge

 

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
Oscar Wilde

 

“It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.”
Albert Camus

 

“A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.”
Victor Hugo

 

“Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.”
Marquis de Sade

 

“The world began without man, and it will end without him.”
Claude Levi-Strauss

 

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
Oscar Wilde

 

“Religions are the cradles of despotism.”
Marquis de Sade

 

“Give me chastity and give me constancy, but do not give it yet.”
Saint Augustine (almost)

 

“These species are not inherently bad. They’re just in the wrong place.”
David Lodge on Humans

 

“Rejoice today, for tomorrow we die.”
Anonymous

 

“Some are more equal than others.”
Jostein Gaarder

 

“For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi — such an abherration in their workaday mendacity — that they feel obliged to alert you when a moment of sincerity is coming on.”
Zoë Heller

 

“There is no order of things except in the human mind.”
Jostein Gaarder

 

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
Plato

 

“Literature is the question minus the answer.”
Roland Barthes

 

“Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.”
Rousseau

 

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”
Kurt Vonnegut

 

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
Steven Weinberg

 

“Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.”
Michel de Montaigne

 

“Humility is the embarrassment you feel when you tell people how wonderful you are.”
Laurence J Peter