The fantasies are beautiful in appearance, but all except one have lost their minds. Only a lonesome Joker sees through the delusion.
—Jostein Gaarder (The Solitaire Mystery)
I sat thinking how terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as incredible as living. One day we suddenly take the fact that we exist for granted - and then, yes, then we don’t think about it anymore until we are about to leave the world again.
—Jostein Gaarder (from The Solitaire Mystery)
A human being, inside himself, is anything but a whole, anything but homogenous; all kinds of everywhichthing are jumbled up inside him, and he is one person one minute and another the next. The body, on the other hand, is homogenous as anything. Indivisible, a one-piece suit, a sacred temple, if you will. It is important to preserve this wholeness.
—Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children)
I have become it seems to me, the apex of an isosceles triangle, supported equally by twin deities, the wild god of memory and the lotus-goddess of the present, but must I now become reconciled to the narrow one-dimensionality of a straight line?
—Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children)
You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame;
How could you become new if you haven’t first become ashes?
—Friedrich Nietzsche (via rabbitinthemoon)
(via chameleonn)
Silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound.
—Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children)
Snakes can lead to triumphs, just as ladders can be descended.
—Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children)
A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
—Tagore
The truth being that Amherst College in the 1960s was for me a devourer of the emotional middle, a maker of psychic canyons, a whacker of the pendulum of Mood with the paddle of Immoderation.
—David Foster Wallace
The severing of an emotional connection is exceptionally more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.
—David Foster Wallace (from The Broom of the System)
