For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?
—Jane Austen, 1813
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Quotes
’Tis not a ridiculous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables?
—Thomas Browne, 1642Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain there would be no life.
—John Updike, 1989The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.
—Salvador Dalí, 1953Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.
—Jane Austen, 1818There is only one antidote to mental suffering and that is physical pain.
—Karl Marx, 1860A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!
—Philip Roth, 1969Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left.
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960Those things are better which are perfected by nature than those which are finished by art.
—Cicero, c. 45 BCThe older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
—Virginia Woolf, 1921You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882I am a friend of the workingman, and I would rather be his friend than be one.
—Clarence Darrow, 1932Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.
—Joan Didion, 2005