The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.
—Donald Barthelme, 1964
Archive
Quotes
The greatest veneration one can show the law is to keep a watch on it.
—Nadine Gordimer, 1971Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, “I would stay here and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.”
—Lisa St. Aubin de Terán, 1989Good fortune turns aside destruction by a great god.
—Instructions of Ankhsheshonqy, c. 100 BCLet the French but have England, and they won’t want to conquer it.
—Horace Walpole, 1745Inventor, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers, and springs and believes it civilization.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1911Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
—Herman Melville, 1849Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural.
—William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847My stern chase after time is, to borrow a simile from Tom Paine, like the race of a man with a wooden leg after a horse.
—John Quincy Adams, 1844Drink does not drown care but waters it, and makes it grow faster.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1749To endeavor to forget anyone is a certain way of thinking of nothing else.
—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688Trade’s proud empire hastes to swift decay.
—Oliver Goldsmith, 1770Our entire history is merely the history of the waking life of man; nobody has yet considered the history of his sleeping life.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, c. 1780