If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.
—Raymond Chandler, 1945
Archive
Quotes
Every thought is, strictly speaking, an afterthought.
—Hannah Arendt, 1978The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
—Theodor Adorno, 1951I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1902If both what is before and what is after are in this same “now,” things which happened ten thousand years ago would be simultaneous with what has happened today, and nothing would be before or after anything else.
—Aristotle, c. 330 BCThank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.
—Sydney Smith, 1855Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
—Jean Genet, 1986One man’s loss is another man’s profit.
—Michel de Montaigne, c. 1580A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.
—Stendhal, 1822Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.
—E.M. Forster, 1910The law looks at no one’s face.
—Gabriel Okara, 1964Take back your golden fiddles, and we’ll beat to open sea.
—Rudyard Kipling, 1892There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883