"I was what you are, you will be what I am."

--

Horace

“Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.”
“Today, Lan Lan is one of my favourite classical pianists.... Years ago I had a great admiration for Arthur Rubinstein but I have no doubt that Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin were also fantastic piano players - though there is no way to listen to them when they were performing.”
“But it is not that easy, is it? I seek a lasting relationship, something permanent in a world of change, in which all is transitory, ephemeral, and full of pain.”
“Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.”
“I'd become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody's error in judgement.”

Source : Sam Lipsyte (2010). “The Ask: A Novel”, p.7, Macmillan
“For several years I've been writing 100-word pieces. More recently I've been putting them together in groups of two and three. I don't see them as sequences, but rather as companion pieces, the way that diptychs often work. The idea comes originally from the paintings of Michael Venezia who places blocks of painted wood next to each other. Proximity is a godsend. The quote is from Wallace Stevens.”
“There is seemingly no biological benefit to acting with conscience; if there were, only moral individuals would survive and procreate. Sadly, we know that's not true. The benefit of conscience is that you won't suffer guilt (private) or shame (public), and that by your own self-imposed definition, you are a moral human, a special kind of animal who takes unique pride in elevating him/herself above the termites.”
“They did that little thing on South Park, and they mentioned my name and had a character of me judging a Halloween contest. It was really funny. That made me the coolest aunt on earth.”

You may also like:

Catullus
Poet
Homer
Author
Juvenal
Poet
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Philosopher
Ovid
Poet
Propertius
Poet
Sappho
Lyric poet
Seneca the Younger
Philosopher
Virgil
Poet