“Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“Self-deception is a pessimistic definition of optimism.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles…”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“So then, in a pleading tone, he whispers: Why did you make me? I never wanted to be made…
For propaganda, of course. It’s all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“All that's happened is inconsequential; it cannot hurt us anymore; there's only music, which lives within us and beyond us, needing us to express it but capable of surviving forever between expressions.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“We Communists say, if it has no practically measurable effect, it's not people's art!”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“He was really quite addicted to her face, and yet for the longest time he could not remember it at all, it being so much brighter than sunlight on a pool of water that he could only recall that blinding brightness; then after awhile, since she refused to give him her photograph, he began to practice looking away for a moment when he was still with her, striving to uphold in his inner vision what he had just seen (her pale, serious, smooth and slender face, oh, her dark hair, her dark hair), so that after immense effort he began to retain something of her likeness although the likeness was necessarily softened by his fallibility into a grainy, washed-out photograph of some bygone court beauty, the hair a solid mass of black except for parallel streaks of sunlight as distinct as the tines of a comb, the hand-tinted costume sweetly faded, the eyes looking sadly, gently through him, the entire image cob-webbed by a sheet of semitranslucent Thai paper whose white fibers twisted in the lacquered space between her and him like gorgeous worms; in other words, she remained eternally elsewhere.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“I've come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“Best listened to in a windowless room, better than best in an airless room—correctly speaking, a bunker sealed forever and enwrapped in tree-roots—the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110) is the living corpse of music, perfect in its horror. Call it the simultaneous asphyxiation and bleeding of melody. The soul strips itself of life in a dusty room.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“A treble clef, for example, resembles a Muscovite or Leningrader in a bulky hooded parka. A bass clef bends as simply and painfully as a silhouetted widow in Leningrad drawing water from the whiteness of a frozen canal.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“In the Hitler years we still believed in books enough to burn them. Imagine,”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“Plato says that as one learns to love, the image of any specific beloved can be left behind for knowledge of the Good.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“Before [Hitler] slammed the door behind him, he needed there to be nothing left, not even the door itself.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“I’ve never shot a civilian except when under orders.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“Well let the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie remember Berlin any way they please. As Comrade Khruschev promised us, we will bury them.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“So even that doesn’t make you happy? What about your Seventh Symphony? At least it rallied people. Once you told me how alive you felt then; you said you gave it your all—
Didn’t you learn in school, he demanded in a hateful voice, that Ivan the Terrible, having coaxed his architect into, so to speak, putting the very best of himself into building Polrovsky Cathedral, afterwards put out his eyes? Anyway, things are so much easier in our century. LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL!”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“The times are new, but the informers are old.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“On the radio, Klavdia Sulzhenko sang “The Blue Kerchief.” The war had died; that song was getting old; then again, so was I. But”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“but the little operative codenamed GREINER, whom I was frankly beginning to consider defeatist, insisted that the Soviets had antidotes to everything, even unfortunate facts. I”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“We should have known that the only reason that Shostakovich’s nightmare restored us to ourselves was so we’d be compelled to drink the cup of anguish. It”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“I’m sure you’ve noticed, continued Comrade Luria, how much aestheticians like to prate about the impotence of form without content, or content without form. But in music, perfect form and content together can remain as stillborn as a law without the seal of Heaven on it. There has to be emotion . . .”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“23 He dreamed that a bomb was singing to him. From far away, the bomb was coming to marry him. The bomb was his destiny, falling on him, screaming.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“Life calls for the highest order of deafness; then we can be, so to speak, happy. It”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“Mitya was almost ready to confess which chord it was which actually caused him to see rainbow icicles. Soon”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“as a certain classical slaveholder once wrote, nothing is more painful than days of joy recollected in days of misery. So”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“But illusions don’t die all at once—”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“whatever fate sends us quickly becomes us, and we grow blind to what we might otherwise have been. And”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“By your command, sir, I said. But Elena was still the one I loved. Knowing that I loved her, I knew who I was.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
“Rejected content will come out somewhere else. That”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
William T. Vollmann
Born place: in Los Angeles, California, The United States
Born date July 28, 1959
See more on GoodReads
“Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
“Twitchy little ferret, aren't you, Malfoy?”
― J.K. Rowling, quote from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“He had always believed that his father had not been able to save a penny from the business, at least his father had never told him anything to the contrary, and Gregor, for his part, had never asked him any questions. In those days Gregor's sole concern had been to do everything in his power to make the family forget as quickly as possible the business disaster which had plunged everyone into a state of total despair. And so he had begun to work with special ardor and had risen almost overnight from stock clerk to traveling salesman, which of course had opened up very different money-making possibilities, and in no time his successes on the job were transformed, by means of commissions, into hard cash that could be plunked down on the table at home in front of his astonished and delighted family. Those had been the wonderful times, and they had never returned, at least not with the same glory, although later on Gregor earned enough money to meet the expenses of the entire family and actually did so. They had just gotten used to it, the family as well as Gregor, the money was received with thanks and given with pleasure, but no special feeling of warmth went with it any more. ”
― Franz Kafka, quote from The Metamorphosis
“The boy grows upward, but the girl grows up.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, quote from The Name of the Wind
“We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
Ink Exchange
Inkdeath
The Crying of Lot 49
Journey to the Cente...
Needful Things
Between Shades of Gr...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
