Joseph Duncan · 270 pages
Rating: (725 votes)
“In a culture that worshipped its ancestors, to die without offspring was next of kin to damnation.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“I believed in the spirits of my ancestors.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“No child is ever loved as they are loved by the ones who gave them life.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“I have always found it both bitter and sweet that men become childlike in their old age.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“I have visited a great many cathedrals and have yet to burst into flames.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“We worshiped our ancestors. We believed in the spirits of men and animals,”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“Sometimes I think it is that loneliness that drove our species a little bit insane. Why else would we have invented such a vast assortment of preposterous characters, all those pantheons of mad gods and uncountable legions of angels and devils and supernatural dream-things, if not to fill the void”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“We've got a sort of brainwashing going on in our country, Morrie sighed. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that's what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it--and have it repeated to us--over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all of this, he has no perspective on what's really important anymore.
Wherever I went in my life, I met people wanting to gobble up something new. Gobble up a new car. Gobble up a new piece of property. Gobble up the latest toy. And then they wanted to tell you about it. 'Guess what I got? Guess what I got?'
You know how I interpreted that? These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.
Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I'm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have.”
― Mitch Albom, quote from Tuesdays with Morrie
“When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being.”
― Milan Kundera, quote from The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“But in good time you'll see that sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“So this is how a person can come to despise himself-knowing he's doing the wrong thing and not being able to stop.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Flowers for Algernon
“I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.”
― John Green, quote from Looking for Alaska
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