“Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there-and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.” (Kerouac 212 On the Road)
“He would have had to roam the entire United States and look in every garbage pail from coast to coast before he found me embryonically convoluted among the rubbishes of my life, his life, and the life of everybody concerned and not concerned. What would I have said to him from my rubbish womb? ‘Don’t bother me, man, I’m happy where I am.”
(Kerouac 250 On the Road)
“The hidden and awful Wisdom which apportions the destinies of mankind is pleased so to humiliate and cast down the tender, good, and wise; and to set up the selfish, the foolish, or the wicked. Oh be humble, my brother, in your prosperity! Be gentle with those who are less lucky; if not more deserving. Think, what right have you to be scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency of temptation, whose success maybe a chance, whose rank may be an ancestors accident, whose prosperity is very likely a satire.” (William Thackeray 594 Vanity Fair)
“Which I wonder brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have and be forced to yield, or to sink out of life having played and lost the game?” (William Thackeray, Vanity Fair)
“I walk around the school hallways and look at the people. I look at the teachers and wonder why they’re here, I f they like their jobs or us. And I wonder how smart they were when they were fifteen. Not in a mean way. In a curious way. It’s like looking at all the students and wondering who’s had their heart broken that day and how they are able to cope with having three quizzes and a book report on top of that” (Steven Chbotsky 142 Perks of Being a Wallflower)
“Such satisfaction as she felt came only from the discovery that having renounced everything that made like happy, easy, splendid, individual, there remained a hard reality, unimpaired by one’s personal adventures, remote as the stars, unquenchable as they are.” (Virginia Woolf, Night and Day)
“ No matter, she still wasn’t happy, she never had been. What caused this inadequacy in her life? Why did everything she leaned on instantaneously decay? Oh if somewhere there were a being, strong and handsome, a valiant heart, passionate and sensitive at once, a poet’s spirit in an angels form, a lyre with strings of steel sounding sweet sad epithalamiums to the heavens. Then why should she not find that being? Vain dream! There was nothing that was worth going that far to get, all was lies! Every smile concealed a yawn of boredom, every joy a misery. Every pleasure brought its surfeit; and the loveliest kisses only left upon your lips a baffled longing for a more intense delight.” (Gustave Flaubert 295 Madame Bovary)
“ Art is all at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator and not life, that art really mirrors.” (Oscar Wilde)
“His head thrown back, he felt the pull of his throat muscles and he wondered whether the peculiar solemnity of looking at the sky comes, not from what one contemplates, but from that uplift of one’s head.” (Ayn Rand 553 The Fountainhead)
“What was his aim in his life? Greatness- in other peoples eyes. Fame, admiration, envy- all that which comes from others. Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them. Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn’t want to be great, but to be thought great. He didn’t want to build, but be admired as a builder. He borrowed form others in order to make an impression on others. There’s your actual selflessness. It’s his ego he’s betrayed and given up. But everyone calls him selfish.” (Ayn Rand 605 The Fountainhead)
