Source: The Alchemist
“A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?”
“A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy”
Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany
“It's not doubt that drives people crazy, it's certainty that does.”
Un chagrin de passage (1994, A Fleeting Sorrow, translated 1995)
Source: Scott Pilgrim, Volume 3: Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness
“An artist is the magician put among men to gratify — capriciously — their urge for immortality.”
Joyce, Act I
Stoppard called this "the most important" speech in the play.
Travesties (1974)
Context: An artist is the magician put among men to gratify — capriciously — their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships — and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes — husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer.
Ceci n’est pas un conte [This Is No Tale] (1796),
“What appeals to you the most is the very thing that will drive you crazy”
Source: Love the One You're With
“The desert is not an island: the island is not enchanted: and the desert is no habitation for men.”
"To speak about the soul"
