Oblivion Quotes - Page 14

• Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts, the rage addicts, the poverty addicts, and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and the tenderness the substances engender. An addict, if you don't mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, from the world's traffic and currency?

  Jeet Thayil

  Cutting, Mind, Saint

  "Narcopolis". Book by Jeet Thayil, 2012.

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• Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before - that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Blessed, Thinking, Technology

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• So then I thought, I'd like you to have something to remember me by, you know, if you ever meet some veela when you're off doing whatever you're doing.' I think dating opportunities are going to be pretty thin on the ground, to be honest.' There's a silver lining I've been looking for,' she whispered, and then she was kissing him as she never kissed him before, and Harry was kissing her back, and it was a blissful oblivion, better than firewhiskey; she was the only real thing in the world, Ginny, the feel of her, one hand on her back, the other in her long sweet-smelling hair.

  J. K. Rowling

  Sweet, Real, Kissing

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• Oblivion is full of people who allow the opinions of others to overrule their belief in themselves.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  People, Belief, Opinion

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• It's calm under the waves in the blue of my oblivion.

  Fiona Apple

  Blue, Calm, Wave

  Song: Sullen Girl, Album: Tidal, 1996

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• The ninety percent of human experience that does not fit into established narrative patterns falls into oblivion.

  Mason Cooley

  Fall, Doe, Patterns

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• I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Giving, Granted, Immortality

  Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Burgin (1998). “Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations”, p.79, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• …They think of suicide as a quick route to oblivion, an escape. Far from it. It merely alters a person from one form to another. Nothing can destroy the spirit. Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful.

  Richard Matheson

  Suicide, Thinking, Spirit

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• Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

  Milan Kundera

  Kitsch, Forgotten, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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• How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?’ Milkman asked. Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that [stuff]. Wanna fly, you got to give up the [stuff] that weighs you down.’ The peacock jumped onto the hood of the Buick and once more spread its tail, sending the flashy Buick into oblivion.

  Toni Morrison

  Giving Up, Vanity, Tails

  Toni Morrison (1987). “Sula”

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• Death promises nothing--not even oblivion.

  Mason Cooley

  Death, Promise

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• If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Writing, Hands, Choices

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• ... one cannot be happy in exile or in oblivion. One cannot always be a stranger. I want to return to my homeland, make all my loved ones happy. I see no further than this.

  Albert Camus

  Want, Return, Stranger

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• And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Peace, Morning, Flower

  "Shadows" l. 1 (1932)

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• Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning it was not a Word, but a chirrup.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Crush, Time, Jesus

  D. H. Lawrence, Simonetta de Filippis (2002). “Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays”, p.36, Cambridge University Press

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• This therefore is Mathematics: She reminds you of the invisible forms of the soul; She gives life to her own discoveries; She awakens the mind and purifies the intellect; She brings light to our intrinsic ideas; She abolishes oblivion and ignorance which are ours by birth.

  Proclus

  Life, Ignorance, Science

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• Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages.... Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas! the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Stars, Pride, Water

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• Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?

  Anton Chekhov

  Beautiful, Believe, Lost Ones

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• There is a law of time, a law of oblivion: glory to the dead; life to the living.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Time, Law, Glory

  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1972). “The First Circle”

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• God has no power over the past except to cover it with oblivion.

  Pliny the Elder

  Past, Over It, Over The Past

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• Oblivion is not to be hired: The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the Register of God, not in the record of man.

  Thomas Browne

  Men, Records, Found

  Sir Thomas Browne (1852). “The Works of Sir Thomas Browne: Hydriotaphia. Brampton urns. A letter to a friend, upon occasion of the death of his intimate friend. Christian morals, &c. Miscellany tracts. Repertorium. Miscellanies. Domestic correspondence, journals, &c. Miscellaneous correspondence”, p.44

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• Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.

  Thomas Hardy

  Men, Spirit, Indispensable

  1874 Far from the Madding Crowd, ch.22.

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• Of four infernal rivers that disgorge/ Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;/Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,/Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;/Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud/ Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon/ Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage./ Far off from these a slow and silent stream,/ Lethe the River of Oblivion rolls/ Her wat'ry Labyrinth whereof who drinks,/ Forthwith his former state and being forgets,/ Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.

  John Milton

  Pain, Hate, Grief

  John Milton, “Paradise Lost: Book 02”

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• This is the pleasantest part of life. Oblivion throws her light coverlet over our infancy; and, soon after we are out of the cradle we forget how soundly we had been slumbering, and how delightful were our dreams. Toil and pleasure contend for us almost the instant we rise from it: and weariness follows whichever has carried us away. We stop awhile, look around us, wonder to find we have completed the circle of existence, fold our arms, and fall asleep again.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Dream, Fall, Light

  Walter Savage Landor (1836). “Pericles and Aspasia”

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• The only solution to the issue of human rights is oblivion.

  Augusto Pinochet

  Rights, Issues, Humans

  Augusto Pinochet's speech, September 21, 1995.

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