“You see how I try
To reach with words
What matters most
And how I fail.”
Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator
Source: The Book Thief
“You see how I try
To reach with words
What matters most
And how I fail.”
Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator
Douglas Adams book The Salmon of Doubt
Douglas Adams. The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time. New York: Random House, 2002, 135–136.<br>Also quoted by Richard Dawkins in his Eulogy for Douglas Adams (17 September 2001) http://www.edge.org/documents/adams_index.html <br class="br">Context: If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.
“I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.”
D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter
Markus Zusak book The Book Thief
Variant: I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty and I wonder how the same can be both.
Source: The Book Thief
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author
Ólafur talking to Vegmey
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland