Arthur Adamov Quotes

Oft in my way have I stood still, though but a casual passenger, so much I felt the awfulness of life.

I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal.

There are so many moments to remember and sometimes I think that maybe we're not really people at all. Maybe moments are what we are.... Sometimes I just survive. But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile.

The Insignificance of Man is a congenial theme; my own insignificance is a sore point.

I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

We are responsible for the Universe because we are the Universe.

We are the universe pretending to be individuals.

I think life is perverse. It can be beautiful, but it won't.

Life is not a chain of events but an area-something spreading out from a hidden centre and welling at once toward all points of the compass.

I really have no idea where the darkness comes from. Other writers have said that there are two subjects worth writing about, love and death; and since I'm a complete flop when it comes to love, I chose death. Too, maybe because of where I came from, I do find it easy to empathise with and write about certain groups of damaged or downtrodden people: the poor, the addicted.

What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I'm a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I'm empty and awake, that I know I'm empty and awake, and that there's no difference between me and anything else.

Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.

Life is perhaps best regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings.

Because I'm a Karamazov. Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful.

People still have existential anxiety. It just may not be expressed in Hebraic idiom.

Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance.

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.

Why do things this beautiful make me want to cry?" I asked Michael as I leaned into him. It was an unguarded question, one I'd never have asked of Hugh. "I don't know," said Michael. "Maybe beauty, true beauty, is so overwhelming, it goes straight to our hearts. Maybe it makes us feel emotions that are locked away inside.

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

I saw something even more beautiful than a sense of humor: an appreciation for life’s essential absurdity.

We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not.