“...the heart of a child can take forty-nine blows before it’s damaged for ever and what’s done can never be undone.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“Hypocrites,’ replied Cale, ‘I’ve come across a lot of them recently. I mean by that I understand now how many of them there are.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“Self-pity, while it should be accorded due respect, is the greatest of all acids to the human soul.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“Do you have any idea how mad you sound?’
‘Indeed I do. I have in moments of doubt considered the question of my sanity.’ (...)
‘And?’
‘Then I consider what a piece of work is man. How defective in reason, how mean his facilities, how ugly in form and movement, in action how like a devil, in apprehension how like a cow. The beauty of the world? The paragon of animals? To me the quintessence of dust.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“We are all cynics now, I suppose, and even a mewling infant knows that to save a life is to make an eternal enemy.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“Even for the very clever it can be like breaking bones to stand back from something that’s been in front of you all your life.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“Feeling sorry for yourself is a universal solvent of salvation.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“It's pointless to blame someone for being themselves and looking to their own interests.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“That’s why it’s much better not to have friends if you have the strength of character to do without them. In the end friends always turn into a nuisance of one kind or another. But if you must have them let them alone and accept that you must allow everyone the right to exist in accordance with the character he has, whatever it turns out to be.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“Whatever discoveries have been made in the land of self-delusion, many undiscovered regions remain to be explored.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“Bůh není nějaký kriminálník, který podvádí v kartách. Chce, abychom se jeho zákony řídili svobodně, z vlastní vůle. Ani Bůh nedokáže nakreslit kulatý čtverec. Bůh je osamělý - chce, aby si lidé poslušnost sami zvolili, a ne aby k ní byli přinuceni strachem.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“Lidské srdce je malé, touží ale po velkých věcech. Nestačí ani zasytit psa, ale celý svět pro něj není dost velký.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“...and what is a good weapon but a good idea made murderous flesh?”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“It is not against reason, said the Englishman, to prefer the destruction of the world to a scratch on your finger – how much easier to understand the same price for the gash in your soul.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“The search for knowledge and the discovery of a great weapon are virtually one and the same. War is the father of everything.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“Nikdy nepřerušuj nepřítele, když se dopouští omylu.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“Nemá smysl zlobit se na někoho za to, že je sám sebou a stará se o vlastní zájmy.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
Paul Hoffman
Born place: The United Kingdom
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“But the melancholy of Worlorn's dying forests had seeped into his flesh, and he saw Gwen through tainted eyes, a doll figure in a suit as faded as despair.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from Dying of the Light
“W tej właśnie komnacie przyszedłem na świat. Z odmętów długiej nocy, która miała pozór, lecz nie była nicością, wyłoniłem się po to, aby wkroczyć nagle w krainę baśni, w pałacowe przepychy fantazji, w dziwaczne dziedziny myśli i wiedzy klasztornej. Nie dziw tedy, że przerażonym a płomiennym wzrokiem badałem świat dookolny, że dzieciństwo spędziłem wśród ksiąg, a młodość roztrwoniłem na marzeniach; lecz zastanawia ta okoliczność, że gdy lata upływały i południe dojrzałego wieku zastało mnie jeszcze żywcem w gnieździe mych przodków — zastanawia, powtarzam, ta okoliczność, że bijące źródła mojego życia zaprawiły się nagłym zastojem, że w kierunku najwłaściwszego mi myślenia stał się przewrót zupełny. Zjawiska rzeczywistości potrącały o mnie jak sny i tylko jako sny, podczas gdy szaleńcze pomysły z krainy snów stały się w zamian nie tylko strawą mego codziennego istnienia, lecz stanowczo jedynym i całkowitym istnieniem w samym sobie.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from Berenice
“Isn't it better to think nothing than to think something that is completely idiotic?”
― Mark Helprin, quote from Freddy and Fredericka
“The Bostonians is special because it never was ‘titivated’ for the New York edition, for its humour and its physicality, for its direct engagement with social and political issues and the way it dramatized them, and finally for the extent to which its setting and action involved the author and his sense of himself. But the passage above suggests one other source of its unique quality. It has been called a comedy and a satire – which it is. But it is also a tragedy, and a moving one at that. If its freshness, humour, physicality and political relevance all combine to make it a peculiarly accessible and enjoyable novel, it is also an upsetting and disturbing one, not simply in its treatment of Olive, but also of what she tries to stand for. (Miss Birdseye is an important figure in this respect: built up and knocked down as she is almost by fits and starts.) The book’s jaundiced view of what Verena calls ‘the Heart of humanity’ (chapter 28) – reform, progress and the liberal collectivism which seems so essential an ingredient in modern democracy – makes it contentious to this day. An aura of scepticism about the entire political process hangs about it: salutary some may say; destructive according to others. And so, more than any other novel of James’s, it reminds us of the literature of our own time. The Bostonians is one of the most brilliant novels in the English language, as F. R. Leavis remarked;27 but it is also one of the bleakest. In no other novel did James reveal more of himself, his society and his era, and of the human condition, caught as it is between the blind necessity of progress and the urge to retain the old. It is a remarkably experimental modern novel, written by a man of conservative values. It is judgemental about people with whom its author identified, and lenient towards attitudes hostile to large areas of James’s own intellectual and personal inheritance. The strength of the contradictions embodied in the novel are a guarantee of the pleasure it has to give.”
― Henry James, quote from The Bostonians
“The sin of smiling whilst Louise was weeping, the sin of shedding my own tears and not hers. The sin of being another being.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Blood of Others
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The Princes of Irela...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.
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