22 quotes found
“Defeat begins with the fear that one had lost.”
“Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?”
“The future is forever a projection of the present.”
“You can only do what you can no matter how you try.”
“It’s a real handicap to have a face with shifty eyes.”
“When will you ever accept the true ugliness of health?”
“Just as trees bear their fruit before winter, just as bamboo grass produces its seeds just before it withers, sex is simply a struggle with death on the human level.”
“If I were just in trousers, somehow I could go out into the world. It would make no difference whether I was naked from the waist up and my feet bare just as long as I had trousers on. Otherwise if...”
“Clinging to one’s outward appearance interferes with living.”
“These days only a guerrilla or a box man would want to cover up his identity to the extent of refusing the convenience of instalment buying. But I am that box man. A representative of anti-instalme...”
“I want to spy on all sorts of places, and the box is a portable hole that occurred to me under the circumstances, it being impossible to punch holes throughout the world.”
“One measure of a civilization, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society.”
“Loneliness—since I was trying to escape it—was hell; and yet for the hermit who seeks it, it is apparently happiness.”
“The world itself, like the mask, began to seem difficult to believe in, and I was stricken with an unutterable sense of loneliness.”
“And again, the dark street. The dark, dark street. The women out shopping for the evening meal of course, and baby carriage and the silver bicycle were already painted out by the darkness; most of ...”
“Something whose connection with human experience we cannot grasp is bound to be frightening.”
“If animal history has been a history of evolution, then the history of mankind is one of retrogression. Hooray for monsters! Monsters are the great embodiments of the weak.”
“There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would...”
“The dial of the clock wears out unevenly; Most worn Is the area round eight. As it is stared at with abrasive glancesunfailingly twice a day, It is weathered away. On the other side The area at two...”
“When he saw the vista of the street reflected in the mirror in which he was looking, he was terror stricken. He had the impression that the whole view had turned into eyes that reproached him.”
