All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.
Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.
Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.
Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven't. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven't. Later still- at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky)- it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven't. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.
Every love story is a potential grief story.
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
Irony- The modern mode: either the devil's mark or the snorkel of sanity.
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.
Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.
Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it's giving way to something else.
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
The more you learn, the less you fear. 'Learn' not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.
The secret of happiness... is to be happy already.
The Sixties were an oyster decade: slippery, luxurious and reportedly aphrodisiacal; they slipped down the historical throat without touching the sides.
We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.
We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.
What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
Why should anything happen when everything has happened?
Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.
Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.
You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people's eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.
Found 28 occurence(s) in 52,095 quotation(s).
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