Quotes By Letter: K

“He saw the shape behind the shape: saw lights, saw an endless crawling hairy thing which was made of light and nothing else, orange light, dead light that mocked life.”

-It, Stephen King

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“Madness is a kind of mental suicide.”

-The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, Stephen King

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“There’s something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt at least a faint, morbid urge to jump. And anyone who has ever put a loaded pistol up to his head…All right, my point is this: even the most well-adjusted person is holding onto his or her sanity by a greased rope. I really believe that. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.”

-The Ballad Of The Flexible Bullet, Stephen King

Recommended by Soulessbox.

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“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.”

-The Body, Stephen King

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“As Jake neared this clump of alien grass, the rose began to open before his eyes. It disclosed a dark scarlet furnace, petal upon secret petal, each burning with its own secret fury.”

-The Dark Tower: The Waste Lands, Stephen King

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“Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”

-The Stand, Stephen King

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“To follow one star is to concede the power of some greater force, some Providence; yet is it still not possible that the act of following itself is the taproot of even greater power? Your GOD, your DEVIL, owns the keys to the lighthouse; I have grappled with that so long and hard in these last two months; but to each of us he has given the responsibility of NAVIGATION.

HAROLD EMERY LAUDER.”

-The Stand, Stephen King

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“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

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“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

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“But I don't happen to agree. If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.”

-The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

Recommended by Theresa.

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“How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren't, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?”

-Another Night in the Ruins, Galway Kinnell

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“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

-Rudyard Kipling

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“To you, I need help for these injuries I put unto myself. The blade you see is covered in blood. That blade is my friend, old and true. What you don't see is that these injuries are my help, and you can never be my blade.”

-Kira

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“To cry is to cleanse. To release the burdens of the day. To let them flow from your body. To collapse inside of yourself. To break down the walls built up so long. Oh I long to sob. A deep loneliness fills my being as I scramble around trying to find the tears to cry. But none come, and instead hate and anger fill the queue. But hate and anger are hardly cleansing. Mistakes gone unpunished are engraved into my mind, and there is no other way to get them out but to emboss them upon myself. It is an art. Finding just the right place and amount of pressure needed to impress the image upon something tangible. Recently it has been more accidental and instinctual rather than purposeful, though occasionally I have had to force myself to take it out on a white piece of paper with an angry red pen. It used to scare me, the things I could create as a result of my mistakes and shame. My creations seemed more destructive since they were the product of pain, rather than beauty. But then I realised how beautiful pain is. To create something means to feel emotions, and feeling emotions is the definition of human pain. And so even though the water does not run from my eyes, the liquid drips from the wounds in my heart. And though in the end, tears are wiped away easily, and it is almost effortless to excuse them, my imprints are the essence of what I feel, and on my body they shall stay.”

-Ray Kislem

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“No more joy - No more sadness
No emotion - Only madness
I can't see
I don't feel
I can't touch
I don't heal.”

-Apathy, KMFDM

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“You laugh at me because I'm different. I laugh because you are all the same!”

-Daniel Knode

Recommended by saskatchewanpirate.

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“She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she's turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only know complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometri said that sometimes just to paint a head, you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.”

-The History of Love, Nicole Krauss

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“Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”

-Me and Bobby McGee, Kris Kristofferson

Recommended by James.

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“For the woman who is dead is a woman with no defenses; she has no more power, she has no more influence; people no longer respect either her wishes or her tastes; the dead woman cannot will anything, cannot aspire to any respect or refute any slander. Never had he felt such sorrowful, such agonising compassion for her as when she was dead.”

-Ignorance, Milan Kundera

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“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy. Avenarius is playing a game, and for him the game is the only thing of importance in a world without importance. But he knows that his game will not make anyone laugh. When he outlined his proposal to the ecologists, he had no intention of amusing anyone. He only wished to amuse himself. I said, 'You play with the world like a melancholy child who has no little brother.'”

-Immortality, Milan Kundera

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“An ugly woman hopes to gain something from the luster of her pretty friend; a pretty woman, for her part; hopes that she will stand out more lustrously against the background of the ugly woman; and for us it follows from this that our friendship is subjected to continuous trials.”

-Laughable Loves, Milan Kundera

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“He wanted to efface her from the photograph of his life not because he had not loved her but because he had. He had erased her, her and his love for her, he had scratched out her image until he had made it disappear as the party propaganda section had made Clementis disappear from the balcony where Gottwald had given his historic speech. Mirek rewrote history just like the Communisty Party, like all political parties, like all peoples, like mankind. They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history.

How long did he stay in front of the railroad station?

And what did this stop mean?

It meant nothing.

He immediately wiped it from his mind, so that now he no longer remembers the small white house with the begonias. Again the world's space was merely an obstacle slowing down his activity.”

-The Book of Laughter, Milan Kundera

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“And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.”

-The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting , Milan Kundera

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“A concentration camp is a world in which people live crammed together constantly, night and day. Brutality and violence are merely secondary (and not in the least indispensable) characteristics. A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy. Porchazka, who was not allowed to chat with a friend over a bottle of wine in the shelter of privacy, lived (unknown to him - a fatal error on his part!) in a concentration camp. Tereza lived in the concentration camp when she lived with her mother. Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.”

-The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

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“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

-The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

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