Pietro > Pietro's Quotes

“A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”
― Jean Genet

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“A great nose may be an index
Of a great soul”
― Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac

“Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette

“I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.”
― Benjamin Franklin Wade

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
― William Faulkner

“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
― William Faulkner

“The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.”
― William Faulkner

“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”
― William C. Faulkner

“The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.”
― William Faulkner

“Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.”
― William Faulkner

“Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.”
― William Faulkner

“If a story is in you, it has to come out.”
― William Faulkner

“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
― William Faulkner, Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech, 1949

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself”
― William Faulkner

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”
― William Faulkner

“Lo, sleep is good, better is death--in sooth
The best of all were never to be born.”
― Heinrich Heine

“The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather-beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.”
― Heinrich Heine

“Every period of time is a sphinx that throws itself into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved.”
― Heinrich Heine