Quotes By Letter: C

“Sometimes it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself.”

-Albert Camus

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“A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.”

-A Happy Death, Albert Camus

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“I'm sorry, Zagreus, but it's been a long time since I talked about certain things. So I don't know any more---or I'm not sure. When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears. Like that sky. It's rain and sun both, noon and midnight. You know, Zagreus, I think of the lips I've kissed, and the wretched child I was, and of the madness of life and the ambition that sometimes carries me away. I'm all these things at once. I'm sure there are times you wouldn't even recognize me. Extreme in misery, excessive in happiness---I can't say it.”

-A Happy Death, Albert Camus

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“In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”

-Actuelles, Albert Camus

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“Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear. And, from this point of view, death is no more worthy of respect than Nero or the inspector at my local police station.”

-Notebooks 1935-1951, Albert Camus

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“...How poor in invention men are! They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it's quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them. So what's the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic and vulgar motives to your action.”

-The Fall, Albert Camus

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“I'll tell you a big secret, mon cher. Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.”

-The Fall, Albert Camus

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“Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came the human beings, they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate - for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.”

-The Fall, Albert Camus

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“I found it difficult to answer his question. I probably loved mother quite a lot, but that didn't mean anything. To a certain extent all normal people sometimes wished their loved ones were dead. Here the lawyer interrupted me, looking very flustered. He made me promise not to say that at the hearing.”

-The Outsider, Albert Camus

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“Man can allow himself to denounce the total injustice of the world and then demand a total justice which he alone will create. But he cannot affirm the total hideousness of the world. To create beauty, he must simultaneously reject reality and exalt certain of its aspects. Art disputes reality, but does not hide from it.”

-The Rebel, Albert Camus

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“She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her.”

-The Stranger, Albert Camus

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“...all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved”

-Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote

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“...so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all it's seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.”

-Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote

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“What we want most is to be held...and told..that everything (everything is a funny thing, is baby milk and papa's eyes, is roaring logs on a cold morning, is hoot owls and the boy who makes you cry after school, is mama's long hair, is being afraid and twisted faces on the bedroom wall)...is going to be alright.”

-Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote

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“We speak of stories ending, [...] when in truth it is we who end. The stories go on and on.”

-Kushiel's Avatar, Jacqueline Carey

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“Dying, we're all alike. [...] Pain levels us all.”

-Kushiel's Dart, Jacqueline Carey

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“Friends ask me how I feel and I lie convincingly
'Cause I don't want to reveal the fact that I'm suffering
So I wear my disguise 'till I go home at night
And turn down all the lights and then I break down and cry.”

-Breakdown, Mariah Carey

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“His son was long-necked and delicate. He was light, airy, made from the quills of a bird. He was white and frail. He had a triangular face, a thin nose, archer's-bow lips, a fine pointed chin. The eyes were so clean and unprotected, like freshly peeled fruit. It was a face that trusted you completely, made you light in the heart at the very moment it placed on you the full weight of responsibility for its protection. Not even the red hair, that frizzy nest which grew outwards, horizontal like a windblown tree in an Italianate painting, this hair did not suggest anything as self-protective as 'temper'.

He should not have hit him.”

-Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey

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“Oscar was afraid of the sea. It smelt of death to him. When he thought about this 'death'. it was not as a single thing you could label with a single word. It was not a discreet entity. It fractured and flew apart, it swarmed like fish, splintered like glass. Death came at him like a ghost in a dream, transmogrifying, protoplasmic, embracing, affectionate, was one minute cold and wet like his father's oilskin, so he shrank from it and cried out in his sleep, pushing the tight-bunched flannel sheet into the pit of his stomach, and then sometimes it was warm and soft and wore the unfocused smile of his mother.”

-Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey

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“She had found the Prince Rupert's Glassworks deserted, its crucible gone grey and lifeless, the metal set hard inside them. Under the glass blower's wooden throne she found a miaowing kitten with pus-filled eyes and paralysed back legs, a creature in so parlous a state that Lucinda, dressed in an ostrich-feathered hat and expensive black gloves, must take a heavy poker and, with her face twisted, her eyes closed, kill it. She felt the crunch travel up her arm.

When the kitten was a soiled and lifeless rag, she leaned the murdering bar against the throne. She thought: I had the strength.

And although she was mostly shaken by what she had done, there was a small part of her that was proud.”

-Oscar And Lucinda, Peter Carey

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“I may not be in control of anything else, but I am in control of my body.”

-The Carpenters: The Untold Story, Karen Carpenter

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“I was drunk, I was mad, he told himself in extenuation of this act. I had a craving to do something rash. I was trying to bring the roof tumbling round my head so that I would see clear sky.”

-The Constant Gardener, John le Carré

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“All of us, at certain moments of our lives, need to take advice and to receive help from other people.”

-Reflections on Life, Alexis Carrel

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“'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'

'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.

'You must be," said the Cat. 'or you wouldn't have come here.'”

-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

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“...it takes all the running you can do to stay in one place.”

-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

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