Quotes By Letter: H

“Anybody can see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman that she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be... more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive, prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older that eighteen in her heart... no matter what merciless hours have done. Look at her. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me- but it does to them. Look at her!”

-Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein

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“There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself.”

-Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein

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“'When you talk to the man upstairs,' he said, 'I want you to tell Him something for me. Tell him it ain't right for people to die when they’re young. I mean it. Tell Him if they got to die at all, they got to die when they're old. I want you to tell Him that. I don't think He knows it ain't right, because He’s supposed to be good and it's been going on for a long, long time. Okay?'”

-Catch 22, Joseph Heller

Recommended by Maya.

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“'You'd better not talk that way about Him, honey,' she warned him reprovingly in a low and hostile voice. 'He might punish you.'

'Isn't He punishing me enough?' Yossarian snorted resentfully. 'You know, we mustn't let him get away with it. Oh no, we certainly musn't let Him get away scot-free for all the sorrow He's caused us. Someday I'm going to make Him pay. I know when. On the Judgment Day. Yes, that's the day I'll be close enough to reach out and grab that little yokel by His neck and -'

'Stop it! Stop it!'

'What the hell are you getting so upset about?' he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. 'I thought you didn't believe in God.'

'I don't,' she sobbed, burting violently into tears. 'But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be.'

Yossarian laughed and turned her arms loose. 'Let's have a little more religious freedom between us,' he proposed obligingly. 'You don't believe in a God you want to, and I won't believe in a God I want to. Is that a deal?'”

-Catch 22, Joseph Heller

Recommended by Maya.

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“'And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways,' Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. 'There is nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about - a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'”

-Catch-22, Joseph Heller

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“If you're going to be shot, whose side do you expect me to be on?”

-Catch-22, Joseph Heller

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“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”

-Catch-22, Joseph Heller

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“Nothing seemed bizarre anymore in his strange and distorted surroundings.”

-Catch-22, Joseph Heller

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“Perhaps passing through the gates of death is like passing quietly through the gate in a pasture fence. On the other side, you keep walking, without the need to look back. No shock, no drama, just the lifting of a plank or two in a simple wooden gate in a clearing. Neither pain, nor floods of light, nor great voices, but just the silent crossing of a meadow. ”

-A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin

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“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”

-Ernest Hemingway

Recommended by khrystian.

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“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

-Ernest Hemingway

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“What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and man was nothing to. [...] Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it was all nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who are in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

-A Clean, Well Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway

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“'I don't love much.'

'Yes,' he said. 'You do. What you tell me about in the nights. That is not love. That is only passion and lust. When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.'

'I don't love.'

'You will. I know you will. Then you will be happy.'

'I'm happy. I've always been happy.'

'It is another thing. You cannot know about it unless you have it.'”

-A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

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“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

-A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

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“All things truly wicked start from an innocence.”

-A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

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“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.”

-A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

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“Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”

-Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway

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“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”

-Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter, Ernest Hemingway

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“At first Krebs, who had been at Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Champagne, St. Mihiel and in the Argonne did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it. His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it. A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told. All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves.

His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers. Even his lies were not sensational at the pool room. His acquaintances, who had heard detailed accounts of German women found chained to machine guns in the Argonne and who could not comprehend, or were barred by their patriotism from interest in, any German machine gunners who were not chained, were not thrilled by his stories.

Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration, and when he occasionally met another man who had really been a soldier and the talked a few minutes in the dressing room at a dance he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time. In this way he lost everything.”

-Soldier's Home, Ernest Hemingway

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“Pedro Romero had the greatness. He loved bull-fighting, and I think he loved the bulls, and I think he loved Brett. Everything of which he could control the locality he did in front of her all that afternoon. Never once did he look up. He made it stronger that way, and did it for himself, too, as well as for her. Because he did not look up to ask if it pleased he did it all for himself inside, and it strengthened him, and yet he did it for her, too. But he did not do it for her at any loss to himself. He gained by it all through the afternoon.”

-The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

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“Be careful, Anais, abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.”

-Henry & June [movie]

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“from their eyelids as they glanced - dripped love.”

-Hesiod

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“Often it is the most deserving people
who cannot help loving
those who destroy them.”

-Gertrude, Hermann Hesse

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“She came, that day, alone and dreamingly up the hill toward me. She had not seen me and the sight of her approaching filled me with apprehension and suspense. I saw her hair, tied in two thick plaits, with loose strands on either side, her cheeks blown by the wind. I saw for the first time in my life how beautiful she was, and how beautiful and dreamlike the play of the wind in her delicate hair, how beautiful and provocative the fall of her thin blue dress over her young limbs; and just as the bitter spice of the chewed bud coursed through me with the whole dread pleasure and pain of spring, so the sight of the girl filled me with the whole deadly foreboding of love, the foreboding of woman.”

-Harry's Loves, Herman Hesse

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“Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.”

-Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

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