Knowing Quotes - Page 16

• One of them is knowing the difference between Morality and Wisdom. Morality is temporary, Wisdom is permanent… Ho ho. Take that one to bed with you tonight.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Differences, Bed, Tonight

  Hunter S. Thompson (2011). “Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the F”, p.8, Simon and Schuster

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• Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.

  Martin Amis

  Rain, Fall, Thinking

  FaceBook post by Martin Amis from Nov 26, 2011

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• Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food and love, but they were pleasant rather than otherwise. But then I'd dream of things like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it for a baby goat. I'd have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands, like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography.

  Elizabeth Bishop

  Dream, Baby, Islands

  Elizabeth Bishop (2015). “Geography III: Poems”, p.15, Macmillan

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• I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Not Knowing, Pagan, Silent

  Arthur Rimbaud, Louise Varèse (2011). “A Season in Hell and the Drunken Boat”, p.11, New Directions Publishing

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• As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.

  Bill Watterson

  Complicated, Calvin And Hobbes Friendship, Concerned

  "The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury". Book by Bill Watterson, October 1992.

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• I don't think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they're talking about the secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things," that nice old lady said to me. "Mr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren't the main things with him.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Nice, Mean, Thinking

  Kurt Vonnegut (2009). “Cat's Cradle: A Novel”, p.54, Dial Press

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• Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.

  Lewis Hyde

  Art, Memories, Inspiration

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• The Code of the Vampires decreed that anyone who violated the Sacred Law was condemned to death, the blood burning. Charles had refused to subject Allegra to the sentence. But Mimi was a different matter. Mimi walked out of the church, knowing that if she ever saw Jack again, she would have to kill him.

  Melissa de la Cruz

  Blood, Law, Vampire

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• On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Daughter, Suicide, Morning

  Jeffrey Eugenides (1993). “The Virgin Suicides: A Novel”, p.1, Macmillan

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• I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.

  Neil Gaiman

  Love, School, Optimistic

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• Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different..." from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure

  Dorothy Allison

  Two, Different, Three

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• It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping: our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don't like to admit it, sometimes it's the only thing.

  Carol Shields

  Sleep, Breathing, Giving

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• They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Stars, Past, Men

  Cormac McCarthy (2015). “Blood Meridian: Picador Classic”, p.228, Pan Macmillan

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• Wherefor are you knowing it? If you stacked all of the Gorg in the galaxy on top of eachother, the Gorg would kill you.

  Adam Rex

  Galaxy, Ifs

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• Knowing the precies answers is not as crucial as the certainty that the answers do, in fact, exist.

  Chris Heimerdinger

  Answers, Facts, Certainty

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• Always knowing you're going to die And until then knowing you've got to live.

  Henry Rollins

  Always Knowing, Dies

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• Hope was based on the unknown, and I liked knowing things. Like that I was going to fail. Failure had better odds.

  Nami Mun

  Odds, Failing, Knowing Things

  Nami Mun (2008). “Miles from Nowhere”, p.85, Penguin

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• ...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.

  Antonio Damasio

  Powerful, Simple, Light

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• She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted something to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

  Richard Yates

  Aunt, Parent, Done

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• A tale is told of twin boys born to different mothers. One is dark by nature, the other light. One is rich, the other poor. One is harsh, the other gentle. One is forever youthful, the other old before his time. One is mortal. They share no bond of blood or sympathy, but they are twins nonetheless. They each live without ever knowing that they are brothers. They each die fighting the blind god.

  Matthew Woodring Stover

  Mother, Brother, Fighting

  Matthew Woodring Stover (2008). “Blade of Tyshalle”, p.1046, Del Rey

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• For the longest time after that, neither of us said anything. I was unaccustomed to his silence, but I didn't mind it. I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quiet a kind of song. The kind you hum without even knowing what it is or why you're humming it. The kind that you've always known.

  Gabrielle Zevin

  Song, Silence, Mind

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• I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Wall, Dark, Caring

  Ernest Hemingway (1997). “A Farewell to Arms”, p.19, Simon and Schuster

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• Well, you missed out on some important protocol, Ella. You can't stand between a Texan and his power tools. We like them. Big ones that drain the national grid. We also like truck-stop breakfasts, large moving objects, Monday night football, and the missionary position. We don't drink light beer, drive Smart cars, or admit to knowing the names of more than about five or six colors. And we don't wax our chests, ever.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Football, Monday, Smart

  Lisa Kleypas (2010). “Smooth Talking Stranger: Number 3 in series”, p.91, Hachette UK

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• People looking up at her--at her smooth pretty vivacious face--had no way of knowing about the painfully articulated resolves formulating in her mind.

  Betty Smith

  People, Mind, Vivacious

  BETTY SMITH (1943). “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”

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• The pain comes from more than the facts of circumstance, or the deeds of others. It comes from within. From understanding what we lost. It comes from knowing how foolish we were - vain, arrogant children - when we thought ourselves happy. It comes from knowing how fragile and doomed the old ways were, just when we thought them and ourselves, secure!. The pain comes from knowing we have never been safe, and therefore will never be safe again. It comes from knowing we can never be children again.

  John Jakes

  Children, Pain, Understanding

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