Mel Vil > Mel's Quotes

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#1

“I’ve had enough of this.’ Romana began to gather her belongings, ‘I’m…’
‘No, don’t go!’ Hector mocked her. ‘You tell me what it’s like.’
‘Is that all you think of me? Aren’t you going to even give me an answer?’
‘I think you should take a good look at yourself, Romana. I don’t think I can help you.’
Romana flew off the sofa in a rage. ‘You’re un-fucking-believable.’
Hector sniggered. ‘You could change. You know that? It’s not too late.”
― Mel Vil, Buenos Aliens

tags: argument, buenos-aliens, crime-novel, dialogue, growing-up

1 likes

#2

“So, why do we do it?” I decided at least to try and give the appearance of being in control.
“I don’t know, I swear some of you English men use it to seek me out and be obsessive on my front doorstep. What do you think? Are you going to come knocking on my door?”
“Well, I don’t know. I mean about the assumptions and the bullshit, not the door.” I thought it needed stressing, but immediately realised it was part of her game. “Perhaps it’s some kind of safety thing. If a stranger starts talking to you in the street, you have little by which to judge your safety. Here in a hotel lobby you have some sanctuary, but that doesn’t mean it’s safe. Not every hotel guest is in a foreign land, and I am sure not every Colombian is going to rob you, but I don’t know.”
“It is prejudice, if you ask me,” she spat distastefully.”
― Mel Vil, The Heart Worm

tags: chance-meeting, foreigners, hotel-lobby, love, romance

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#3

“If anything, it’s a destructive tendency, I have,” said Sebald. “I should stop, but if only they’d open this place already. I thought the gates of hell were supposed to be open night and day. First port of call is the cubicle to see if I can’t get this brain of mine more focussed on the important objective of doing some discreet rooting and tooting on the dance floor in-between bouts of indiscreet shaking and raking.”
― Mel Vil, The Dull Fire: A novel

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#4

“Perhaps you were just bathing in the overtly macho atmosphere. Besides you are talking about taking advantage, why haven’t you done so yet? These people would bow to your command,” said Blanche.
Jérémie looked at her and then looked away. She shook her head and said, “I mean all of them, us and them.”
― Mel Vil, The Dull Fire: A novel

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#5

“Statistically, the incidence of ‘true statements’—definitional, demonstrative, tautological—in any given mass of discourse is probably small. The current of language is intentional, it is instinct with purpose in regard to audience and situation. It aims at attitude and assent. It will, except on specialized occasions of logically formal, prescriptive, or solemnized utterance, not convey ‘truth’ or ‘information of facts’ at all. We communicate motivated images, local frameworks of feeling. All descriptions are partial. We speak less than the truth, we fragment in order to reconstruct desired alternatives, we select and elide.”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

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#6

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: accomplishment, attributed-no-source, be-yourself, conformity, individuality

69534 likes

#7

“The externals of English are being acquired by speakers wholly alien to the historical fabric, to the inventory of felt moral, cultural existence embedded in the language. The landscapes of experience, the fields of idiomatic, symbolic, communal reference which give to the language its specific gravity, are distorted in transfer or lost altogether”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

tags: english, language, lies, translation

0 likes

#8

“The journey is the reward”
― Steve Jobs

135 likes

#9

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

tags: books, humor

150649 likes

#10

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles W. Eliot

tags: books, friends, reading, teachers

13921 likes

#11

“One can only describe the human but can never define it because humans are complex in their nature.”
― Zaman Ali, HUMANITY Understanding Reality and Inquiring Good

tags: human, human-nature

35 likes

#12

“Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves … and other animals.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

tags: animals, aphorism, aphorisms, conceal, concealment, creatures, culture, illusion, illusions, impression, mother-nature, nature, pretend, pretense, symbolism, symbols, veil

14 likes

#13

“We must face the ultimate contradiction that our free and democratic society was made possible by massive slave labor.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

tags: democracy, slavery

7 likes

#14

“I have possessed that heart, that noble soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was, because I was all that I could be.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1351 likes

#15

“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
― Aristotle

tags: crime, poverty, revolution, society

941 likes

#16

“Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

tags: culture

31 likes

#17

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
― Nora Ephron

tags: courage, empowerment, self-determination, women

6531 likes

#18

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

tags: 1970, inspirational, stories, writing

31468 likes

#19

“What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.”
― Henry Stanley Haskins, Meditations in Wall Street

1465 likes

#20

“Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

tags: infatuation, love, passion

2083 likes

#21

“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.”
― Albert Einstein

tags: einstein, paraphrased, science, systems

2911 likes

#22

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

tags: paranoia, proverbs, wit

1750 likes

#23

“To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

tags: rapture

470 likes

#24

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

14515 likes

#25

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
― Albert Einstein

tags: 1929, viereck-interview

37566 likes

#26

“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

tags: importance, kiss, kissing

6778 likes

#27

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”
― Francis Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon IV: The Advancement of Learning

2335 likes

#28

“What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

828 likes

#29

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner

tags: courage, determination, hope, risk

6296 likes

#30

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

tags: attributed-no-source, enemies, forgiveness, strategy

81657 likes

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