Journey To The End Of The Night Quotes

On a Parisienne's Bookshelf
THERE ARE MANY BOOKS ON A PARISIENNE'S BOOKSHELF:

The books you so often claim you've read that you actually believe you have.
The books you read in school from which you remember only the main character's name.
The art books your parents give you each Christmas so you can get some "culture".
The art books that you bought yourself and which you really love.
The books that you've been promising yourself you'll read next summer … for the past ten years.
The books you bought only because you liked the title.
The books that you think makes you cool.
The books you read over and over again, and that evolve along with your life.
The books that remind you of someone you loved.
The books you keep for your children, just in case you ever have any.
The books whose first ten pages you've read so many times you know them by heart.
The books you own simply because you must and, taken together, form intangible proof that you are well read.
AND THEN THERE ARE THE BOOKS YOU HAVE READ, LOVED, AND WHICH ARE A PART OF YOUR IDENTITY:

The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
Belle du Seigneur, Albert Cohen
Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
L'Écume des jours, Boris Vian
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand C ~ Caroline De Maigret

If that's the case, hurrah for the crazy people! Look, Lola, do you remember a single name, for instance, of any of the soldiers killed in the Hundred Years War? Did you ever try to find out who any of them were? No! You see? You never tried. As far as you are concerned, they are as anonymous, as indifferent, as the last atom of that paperweight, as your morning bowel movement. Get into your head, Lola, that they died fot nothing! For absolutely nothing, the idiots! I say it and I'll say it again! I've proved it! The one thing that counts is life! In ten thousand years, I'll bet you, this war, remarkable as it may seem to us at present, will be utterly forgotten... Maybe here and there in the world a handful of scholars will argue about its causes or the dates of the principal hecatombs that made it famous. Up until now those are the only things about men that other men have thought worth remembering after a few centuries, a few years, or even a few hours... I don't believe in future, Lola... ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

My journey, my life.
My life can only be navigated by me. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We went there to grope for our happiness, which all the world was threatening with the utmost ferocity. We were ashamed of wanting what we wanted, but something had to be done about it all the same. Love is harder to give up than life. In this world we spend our time killing or adoring, or both together. "I hate you! I adore you!" We keep going, we fuel and refuel, we pass on our life to a biped of the next century, with frenzy, at any cost, as if it were the greatest of pleasures to perpetuate ourselves, as if, when all's said and done, it would make us immortal. One way or another, kissing is as indispensable as scratching. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

Those people were pushing life and night and day in front of them. Life hides everything from people. Their own noise prevents them from hearing anything else. They couldn't care less. The bigger and taller the city, the less they care. Take it from me. I've tried. It's a waste of time. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

Dreams rise in the darkness and catch fire from the mirage of moving light. What happens on the screen isn't quite real; it leaves open a vague cloudy space for the poor, for dreams and the dead. Hurry hurry, cream yourself full of dreams to carry you through the life that's waiting for you outside, when you leave here, to help you last a few days more in that nightmare of things and people. Among the dreams, choose the ones most likely to warm your soul. I have to confess that I picked the sexy ones. No point in being proud; when it comes to miracles, take the ones that will stay with you. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

They were conscientious, you couldn't deny it, and they were also flabby, heartless sons-of-bitches. In other words, they were well chosen, as mindlessly enthusiastic as any employer could dream of. Sons that would have delighted my mother, worshiping their bosses, if only she could have had one all to herself, a son she could have been proud of in the eyes of the world, a real legitimate son. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

We get out of life what we bring to it. There is not a dream which may not come true if we have the energy which determines our own fate. We can always get what we want if we will it intensely enough... So few people succeed greatly because so few people conceive a great end, working towards it without giving up. We all know that the man who works steadily for money gets rich; the man who works day and night for fame or power reaches his goal. And those who work deeper, more spiritual achievements will find them too. It may come when we no longer have any use of it, but if we have been willing it long enough, it will come! ~ Ruskin Bond

The end of the ridge and the end of the world ... then nothing but that clear, empty air. There was nowhere else to climb. I was standing on the top of the world. ~ Stacy Allison

The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning is, in fact, the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe. Suicide would mean the end of this encounter, and absurdist reasoning considers that it could not consent to this without negating its own premises. ~ Albert Camus

We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time - inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb. ~ Alain De Botton

Kaz had wriggled out of his coat and managed to yank off his shirt, leaning on the sink in the bathroom.
"For Saints' sake, let us help you," said Nina.
Kaz gripped the end of a bandage in his teeth and tore off a piece. "I don't need your help. Keep working with Colm."
"What is wrong with him?" Nina grumbled as they went back to the sitting room to drill Colm on his cover story.
"Same thing that's always wrong with him," said Jesper. "He's Kaz Brekker. ~ Leigh Bardugo

The afflicted are almost upon them. The air is a din of hypersonic bursts, snarls and empty shell casings. But still I hear him. As his people start to fall. As his pistol clicks empty. As he rises with only his knuckles left between him and the sheer brutality of mathematics. As the music swells above the carnage, still I hear him breathe the words. "Tell them I was thinking of them. At the end." They pile onto him. All snarls and teeth and fists. But as he falls, I am holding his hand. Easing him into his long good night. "I will tell them, David." The last words he will ever hear. 'I promise. ~ Amie Kaufman

You never do a movie and not want it to work. You accept whatever it is. You have to, but nobody in their right mind would not want the movie to be getting talked about at the end of the year. ~ Albert Brooks

Usually I'll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it makes sense. I don't think out the plot ahead of time. ~ Heidi Julavits

The documentary style is an incredibly flexible and useful one. It's a wonderful tool for establishing the credibility of the version of things that's in the photograph - a kind of rhetorical device or rhetorical strategy. It's always felt very natural to me, because I want a person to end up thinking about the world, and to think about it in a way that is transformed by the experience of art. ~ Frank Gohlke

By the end of the summer of 1973 I thought it was virtually impossible for South Vietnam to survive. How in the heck could they? ~ William Westmoreland

From our first day alive on this planet, they began teaching society everything it knows and experiences. It was all brainwashing bullshit. Their trio of holy catechisms is: faith is more important than reason; inputs are more important than outcomes; hope is more important than reality. It was designed to choke your independent thinking and acting - to bring out the lowest common denominator in people - so that vast amounts of the general public would literally buy into sponsorship and preservation of their hegemonic nation. Their greatest achievement was the creation of the two-party political system; it gave only the illusion of choice, but never offered any change; it promised freedom, but only delivered more limits. In the end, you got stuck with two leading loser parties and not just one. It completed their trap of underhanded domination, and it worked masterfully. Look anywhere you go. America is a nation of submissive, dumbed-down, codependent, faith-minded zombies obsessed with celebrity gossip, buying unnecessary goods, and socializing without purpose on their electronic gadgets. The crazy thing is that people don't even know it; they still think they're free. Everywhere, people have been made into silent accomplices in the government's twisted control game. In the end, there is no way out for anyone. ~ Zoltan Istvan

I think it is always important to ask fundamental questions, but when we do ask a fundamental question, most of us are seeking an answer, and then the answer is invariably superficial because there is no yes or no answer to life. Life is a movement, an endless movement, and to inquire into this extraordinary thing called life, with all its innumerable aspects, one must ask fundamental questions and never be satisfied with answers, however satisfactory they may be, because the moment you have an answer, the mind has concluded, and conclusion is not life - it is merely a static state. So what is important is to ask the right question and never be satisfied with the answer, however clever, however logical, because the truth of the question lies beyond the conclusion, beyond the answer, beyond the verbal expression. The mind that asks a question and is merely satisfied with an explanation, a verbal statement, remains superficial. It is only the mind that asks a fundamental question and is capable of pursuing that question to the end - it is only such a mind that can find out what is truth. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

You're about to meet the business end of my shotgun, comin' on McKay land and insulting me and mine. ~ Lorelei James

When you walk to the end of a fiction, its procedure is 1) intuitive; and 2) emotional. Its intelligence is emotional, I think. ~ Fred D'Aguiar

Pretty,eh?"
I jumped a foot. "Nonna!"
She was standing in my doorway, beaming like a demented gnome. "For your underwater dance."
"It looks like....a toga."
"Toga," she sniffed as she stalked across the room to lift the dress from its hanger, "is for boys at silly parties. This is for a goddess." She held it up to me. "You will be Salacia, Roman goddess of water."
It still looked like a toga, and not a very big one, although it did almost reach the floor. My legs would be covered, which was all well and good, except that, other than going a little too long without defuzzing, I didn't have much of a problem with my legs. I did know this wasn't going to work. I just had no idea at the moment how I was going to make it not happen.
"This is awfully...pagan of you, Nonna."
She rolled her eyes. "Ai, sixteen, with the smart mouth and such certainty. You think I just read the Bible? A goddess, she has more fun than a saint."
"Nonna!"
"Ah!" She poked me in the center of the chest with her middle finger. "Fun, si, but a bad end if she thinks to hold the heart of a boy who wants only to play. Salacia, she let Neptune chase her and chase her and prove his heart was true."
I didn't argue. My grasp of Greco-Roman mythology is shaky at best, and derived mostly from the Percy Jackson books. I had my doubts about Neptune's heart, but figured it would only be smart-assy to mention that to my grandmother. ~ Melissa Jensen

I want a sword to slit her end to end and then, with one hundred more cuts, dice her body into small pieces and leave the bloodied,quivering remains of skin, muscle, and soulless guts on her front lawn, arranged in a gruesome scarlet letter. ~ Julie Metz

Freedom is indivisible - there is no "s" on the end of it. You can erode freedom, diminish it, but you cannot divide it and choose to keep "some freedoms" while giving up others. ~ Ronald Reagan

Every good enough mother teaches her child that no matter how bad it seems- no matter how many rejections or scraped knees or broken bones there are- it is going to be okay. Maybe not the way we wanted or hoped it would be, but still okay. A good parent returns a child to the place where she can trust that although she might be bitter or hateful for a moment, it's not the end of the world. There is love here. There is light and quiet here. There is peace. ~ Geneen Roth

Despite my deep unease about animal advocates working for things we don't want and asking for changes we don't believe in, I am not an "abolitionist." First, the abolition of animal slavery will no more end speciesism by itself than the abolition of American slavery ended racism. To change the world, I think we should aim higher. Second, I'm increasingly convinced that no matter who uses the term, it hides a slur. When used to refer to others, it connotes zealotry and obstructionism, and when taken as self-definition, it is seen as an attack by anyone who does not apply it to herself. Yes, it's a highly defensible moral philosophy, right up there with Peter Singer's application of Utilitarianism to animal liberation, and Tom Regan's Theory of Rights, but like those other intellectual concepts, it's useful only so far as it engenders right action. ~ Sarahjane Blum

The notion that racial caste systems are necessarily predicated on a desire to harm other racial groups, and that racial hostility is the essence of racism, is fundamentally misguided. Even slavery does not conform to this limited understanding of racism and racial caste. Most plantation owners supported the institution of black slavery not because of a sadistic desire to harm blacks but instead because they wanted to get rich, and black slavery was the most efficient means to that end. By and large, plantation owners were indifferent to the suffering caused by slavery; they were motivated by greed. Preoccupation with the role of racial hostility in earlier caste systems can blind us to the ways in which every caste system, including mass incarceration, has been supported by racial indifference – a lack of caring and compassion for people of other races. ~ Michelle Alexander

She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window - and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps - and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer - and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly! Never ~ Wilkie Collins

She had often disconcerted me by the truth. In the days when we were in love, I would try to get her to say more than the truth - that our affair would never end, that one day we should marry. I wouldn't have believed her, but I would have liked to hear the words on her tongue, perhaps only to give me the satisfaction of rejecting them myself. But she never played that game of make-believe, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, she would shatter my reserve with a statement of such sweetness and amplitude ~ Graham Greene

My partner and I won the race, and I threw my hat into the air and bent to pick it up. Everyone started laughin' because I had split the back end of my pants out, and I wasn't wearing shorts. ~ Chris LeDoux

I longed only to turn back and climb and begin life all over again in a place where I might find the peace I'd once known in mountains of another time and another place, and I wondered-if I could slip out of camp unobserved-whether I just might be able to stay hidden and uncaptured until this war came to an end. ~ Andrew Krivak

Jack hoped they weren't going back to Silver Hill, even in daylight. 'Are we going far?' Elan laughed. 'Only to the far end of the kitchen garden, the bushes there are laden with fruit but it will probably take us till lunchtime to pick enough.' 'They're for picking, not eating,' Nora reminded Camelin. 'It's not my fault. It's not easy picking blackberries with a beak without squashing them. You wouldn't want me to put squashed fruit in the bowl would you? ~ Catherine Cooper

I won't wait until the end of my term to say I made mistakes at the beginning. That's too late. I will try to adopt the proper behaviour, if the French give me the chance, right from the start. ~ Francois Hollande

New preoccupations take the place of the old, hope excites more hope and ambition more ambition. They do not look for an end to their misery, but simply change the reason for it. ~ Seneca.

At the end of the day, perhaps the best argument against capital punishment may be that it is an issue beyond the limited capacity of government to get things right. ~ Scott Turow

Abstract knowledge is not enough. At the end of the day, it's about how one reacts to circumstances in an extreme real-time situation. ~ Boaz Lavie

The history of the own that is grasped on too small a scale and the foreign that is treated too badly reaches an end at the moment when a global co-immunity structure is born, with a respectful inclusion of individual cultures, particular interests and local solidarities. This structure would take on planetary dimensions at the moment when the earth spanned by networks and built over by foams, was conceived as the own, and the previously dominant exploitative excess as the foreign. With this turn, the concretely universal would become operational. The helpless whole is transformed into a unity capable of being protected. A romanticism of brotherliness is replaced by a cooperative logic. Humanity becomes a political concept. Its members are no longer travellers on the ship of fools that is abstract universalism, but workers on the consistently concrete and discrete project of a global immune design. Although communism was a conglomeration of a few correct ideas and many wrong ones, its reasonable part - the understanding that shared life interests of the highest order can only be realized within a horizon of universal co-operative asceticisms - will have to assert itself anew sooner or later. It presses for a macrostructure of global immunizations : co-immunism. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

On all levels, evolution occurs in response to a crisis situation, not infrequently a life-threatening one, when the old structures, inner or outer, are breaking down or are not working anymore. On a personal level, this often means the experience of loss of one kind or another: the death of a loved one, the end of a close relationship, loss of possessions, your home, status, or a breakdown of the external structures of your life that provided a sense of security. ~ Eckhart Tolle

To narrow natural rights to such neat slogans as "liberty, equality, fraternity" or "life, liberty, property," . . . was to ignore the complexity of public affairs and to leave out of consideration most moral relationships. . . .

Burke appealed back beyond Locke to an idea of community far warmer and richer than Locke's or Hobbes's aggregation of individuals. The true compact of society, Burke told his countrymen, is eternal: it joins the dead, the living, and the unborn. We all participate in this spiritual and social partnership, because it is ordained of God. In defense of social harmony, Burke appealed to what Locke had ignored: the love of neighbor and the sense of duty. By the time of the French Revolution, Locke's argument in the Second Treatise already had become insufficient to sustain a social order. . . .

The Constitution is not a theoretical document at all, and the influence of Locke upon it is negligible, although Locke's phrases, at least, crept into the Declaration of Independence, despite Jefferson's awkwardness about confessing the source of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

If we turn to the books read and quoted by American leaders near the end of the eighteenth century, we discover that Locke was but one philosopher and political advocate among the many writers whose influence they acknowledged. . . .

Even Jefferson, though he had read Locke, cites in his Commonplace Book such juridical authorities ~ Russell Kirk

Imagine yourself winning?.. Wouldn't that make you overconfident?'
'Not at all... It's called "positive visualisation", like being a runner: see yourself making it across the finish line, you pace yourself better, run a better race too. See yourself winning at poker, you make the winning calls. See yourself as a loser, you've not got the self-belief or determination to play well, no matter how much money you gamble.'
Chester - to Jennifer
I was shocked to hear the words of the Love Professor echoed by Chester: like yourself and you'll win; think you're a loser, and sure enough you'll end up losing. ~ Jennifer Cox

The stakes in my books tend to be kind of ridiculously high. In 'Kid vs. Squid,' the question is whether or not the California coast will be subsumed by the ocean in favor of the creation of a new Atlantis. In 'The Boy at the End of the World,' what's at stake is the survival of the human species. ~ Greg Van Eekhout

You may have seen people praying to an image as if it had special power. Perhaps they're wishing for the well-being of their family, for material prosperity, or to recover from illness. But this way of practicing faith only leads to a dead end. Buddha images should serve as inspirations to cultivate the infinite loving kindness latent in the buddha within us. ~ Shinjo Ito

The law has an evangelistic use.[7] Let man try to obey the law for salvation. At first he will think he can do it. Then he will learn that he cannot possibly be as holy as the law demands. Wielded by the Spirit, the law condemns him, pronounces a curse upon him, and declares him liable to the wrath of God and the torments of hell (Gal. 3:10). Finally, he will come to the desperate realization that only God can save him by changing his heart and giving him a new nature. The Spirit brings him to the end of the law, Christ Jesus, as the only righteousness acceptable with God ~ Anonymous

I am trying to give the best performance possible in 400 pages. I want readers to be scared; I want them to be moved. Entertainment doesn't necessarily mean something trivial, but it does mean people wanting to get to the end of a book. ~ Mark Billingham

Guilt and shame are both emotions of self-evaluation; however, that is where the similarities end. The majority of shame researchers agree that the difference between shame and guilt is best understood as the differences between "I am bad" (shame) and "I did something bad" (guilt). Shame is about who we are and guilt is about our behaviors. If I feel guilty for cheating on a test, my self-talk might sound something like "I should not have done that. That was really stupid. Cheating is not something I believe in or want to do." If I feel shame about cheating on a test, my self-talk is more likely to sound like "I'm a liar and a cheat. I'm so stupid. I'm a bad person. ~ Brene Brown

A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of impossibility to it - like running a dead-end maze - no way out - it couldn't come to a happy conclusion and yet I was doing it anyway because it was all I could think of to do. ~ Tim O'Brien

Existence is governed by its own law. Here, the things impermanent by nature
are bound to meet their end. Hence, with the passage of time, not only Ravana's
Lanka but "Krishna's" Dwarka also sinks. ~ Deep Trivedi

Lending Out Books

You're always giving, my therapist said.
You have to learn how to take. Whenever
you meet a woman, the first thing you do
is lend her your books. You think she'll
have to see you again in order to return them.
but what happens is, she doesn't have the time
to read them, & she's afraid if she sees you again
you'll expect her to walk about them, & will
want to lend her even more. So she
cancels the date. You end up losing
a lot of books. You should borrow hers. ~ Hal Sirowitz

An open mind is not an end in itself but a means to the end of finding truth. ~ Peter Kreeft

If the world ended the day after tomorrow, I would not go to my death without first knowing I'd done everything I could to save my friend. ~ Rick Riordan

Hillary Clinton's 506-page memoir has come out. So much of her personality shines through, that in the end, you, too, will want to sleep with an intern. ~ Craig Kilborn