Quotes · Skopia

898 quotes

The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still. Like when they say "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end."

Jean Rhys

1934

★ 0.9

Novel

Trembled to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual's own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.

Herman Melville

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities · 1852

★ 1.0

Novel

Work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.

George MacDonald

Wilfrid Cumbermede · 1872

★ 1.0

Novel

Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.

Kate Chopin

The Awakening · 1899

★ 1.0

Novel

The whole effect of Christianity was to transfer the drama onto the moral plane.

Andre Gide

The Counterfeiters · 1925

★ 1.0

Novel

When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.

Hermann Hesse

Narcissus and Goldmund · 1930

★ 1.0

Novel

It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanism of friendship.

Colette

1932

★ 1.0

Novel · Science fiction

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

Douglas Adams

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy · 1978

★ 1.0

Novel

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Milan Kundera

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting · 1979

★ 1.0

Novel

He could see the island of Manhattan off to the left. The towers were jammed together so tightly, he could feel the mass and stupendous weight. Just think of the millions, from all over the globe, who yearned to be on that island, in those towers, in those narrow streets! There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening-and he was among the victors!

Tom Wolfe

The Bonfire of the Vanities · 1987

★ 1.0

Novel · Historical literature

One reproaches a lover, but can one reproach a husband, when his only fault is that he no longer loves?

Madame de La Fayette

1678

★ 1.1

Novel

Politics in the middle of things that concern the imagination are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert.

Stendhal

The Red and the Black · 1830

★ 1.1

Novel · Modernist literature

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1913

★ 1.1

Novel · Coming of age story

I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.

Hermann Hesse

Demian · 1919

★ 1.1

Novel

Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH...

Jack Kerouac

Big Sur · 1962

★ 1.1

Novel

We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.

Chuck Palahniuk

Invisible Monsters · 1999

★ 1.1

Novel · Historical literature

Statements, indictments, bills are circulated, shuffled between judges, prosecutors, the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor’s office; each step in the process clear, logical, and designed to create corpses by due process of law.

Hilary Mantel

Bring Up the Bodies · 2012

★ 1.1

Novel

A man who is always ready to believe what is told him will never do well.

Gaius Petronius

Satyricon · 66

★ 1.2

Novel

Debt is the prolific mother of folly and of crime.

Benjamin Disraeli

Henrietta Temple · 1837

★ 1.2

Novel

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues—faith and hope.

Charles Dickens

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby · 1839

★ 1.2

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