An Enormous Amount Of Quotes About Life From Many People

“I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief
duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.”
–Helen Keller
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“It is amazing how much people can get done if they do not worry
about who gets the credit.”
–Sandra Swinney
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“I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it, and
I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: hard
work and realizing what it opportunity and what isn’t.”
–Lucille Ball
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“My parents always told me that people will never know how long
it takes you to do something. They will only know how well it is
done.”
–Nancy Hanks
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“While I was in Ann Arbor I heard that Boston was a good place to
play acoustic music because they still had plenty of clubs. So I
moved to Cambridge. I roomed with a Harvard student. I got an
apartment the first day I got to town by going to Harvard
housing, so I could get cheaper rates, $80 a month or something.
I even went to some Harvard classes, just to sit in, because I
enjoyed the performance of the professors. The teachers were
always so theatrical at Harvard, intelligent show business
people, that could keep your attention, and that I think, is the
great advantage of Harvard. So I used to go for the show, no
matter what subject it was. You could just drop in to a class
and watch, it wouldn’t matter if you went to the school. No one
even asked. The show was good and you would learn something, but
you wouldn’t get any credit for it. I didn’t need the credit.”
(Negative Theatre 87)
–Ric Ocasek
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“He who angers you enslaves you.”
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“In three words, I can sum up everything I know about life: it
goes on.”
–Robert Frost
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“Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.”
–Ana虐 Nin
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“Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did,
but she did it backwards and in high heels.”
–Faith Whittlesey
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“Your real duty is to save your dream.”
–Mogdiliani
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“If there is no wind, row.”
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“One good deed dying tongueless slaughters a thousand waiting
upon that.”
–William Shakespeare
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“There is danger in reckless change; but greater danger in blind
conservatism.”
–Henry George
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“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or
how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The
artist never entirely known. We guess. We may be wrong, but we
take leap after leap in the dark.”
–Agnes de Mille
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“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we
stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of
inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim
a little more land.”
–T. H. Huxley
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“The fact that someone says something doesn’t mean it’s true.
Doesn’t mean they’re lying, but it doesn’t mean it’s true.”
–Carl Sagan
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“I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if
I do not live.”
–Francoise Sagan
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“I tell you: one must have chaos in one to give birth to a
dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche
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“Often the real test of courage is not to die, but to live.”
–Vittorio Alfieri
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“The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are
able to have thoughts of our own.”
–Erich Fromm
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“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
–Socrates
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“He loved to ask his mother questions. It was the pleasantest
thing for him to ask a question and then to hear what answer his
mother would give. Bambi was never surprised that question after
question should come into his mind continually and without
effort. He found it perfectly natural, and it delighted him very
much. It was very delightful too, to wait expectantly till the
answer came. If it turned out the way he wanted, he was
satisfied. Sometimes, of course, he did not understand, but that
was pleasant also because he was kept busy picturing what he had
not understood, in his own way. Sometimes he felt very sure that
his mother was not giving him a complete answer, was
intentionally not telling him all she knew. And, at first, that
was very pleasant, too. For then there would remain in him such
a lively curiosity, such suspicion, mysteriously and joyously
flashing through him, such anticipation, that he would become
anxious and happy at the same time, and grow silent.” (Bambi 20-
21)
–Felix Salten
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“There are no words that can be spoken to shatter the darkness.
What is left is silence, and the dawn must creep at its own pace
as we wait. There are no words for how we feel. The silence of
the night is the only thing that captures it, and dawn the only
thing to set it free. So we wait…”
–Karla Jameson
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“When he drank his coffee, that was all he did. If his com
chimed or there was a caller at the door, he ignored it. He
didn’t read the newsfax, nor even listen to any of his favourite
music. His one cup deserved, and got, his full attention. He’d
once heard a story about a monastery on the top of some mountain
in Japan or somewhere. After a long trek in the cold to get
there, the monks would offer to sell you a cup of coffee. You
had a choice: There was a two-dollar cup — or a two-hundred-
dollar cup. When pressed to explain the difference, the monks
were reported to say, ‘A hundred and ninety-eight dollars.'” (The
Digital Effect 21-22)
–Steve Perry
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“A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our
worlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of
serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before the
change.”
–Earl Nightengale
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“People are where they are because that’s exactly where they
really want to be…whether they’ll admit that or not.”
–Earl Nightengale
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“We can let circumstances rule us, or we can take charge and rule
our lives from within.”
–Earl Nightengale
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“Your world is a living expression of how you are using and have
used your mind.”
–Earl Nightengale
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“Am I motivated by what I really want out of life – or am I mass-
motivated?”
–Earl Nightengale
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“All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press
on to your destination.”
–Earl Nightengale
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“Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or
ideal.”
–Earl Nightengale
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“Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with
repetition and emotion will one day become a reality.”
–Earl Nightengale
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“Other times I think about them, though — all this October I
have done so, it seems, because October is the time when men
think mostly about far places and the roads which might get them
there. I sit on the bench in front of Bell’s Market and think
about Homer Buckland and about the beautiful girl who leaned over
to open his door when he come down that path with the full red
gasoline can in his right hand — she looked like a girl of no
more than sixteen, a girl on her learner’s permit, and her beauty
was terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it
turned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not
killed, although part of me died at her feet.” (Mrs. Todd’s)
–Stephen King
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“It means that no blue ribbon is forever. Someday — if the
world doesn’t explode itself in the meantime — someone will run
a two-minute mile in the Olympics. It make take a hundred years
or a thousand, but it will happen. Because there is no ultimate
blue ribbon. There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is
mortality, but there is no ultimate.” (Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut)
–Stephen King
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“The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at
hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have
applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.”
–Vince Lombardi
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“What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists
and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind
in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined
not to quit until he finds it.”
–Alexander Graham Bell
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“Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach
down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce
of power it takes to win when the match is even.”
–Muhammad Ali
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“This environment [New York] is heaven. I love walking down the
street and seeing faces and drama and happiness and sadness and
dirt and cleanliness. I could never be a country person, sitting
around trees trying to write a song. I would rather be in the
middle of society, whether it’s growing or crumbling.”
–Ric Ocasek
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“If a life could have a theme song — and I believe every
worthwhile one has — mine is a religion, an obsession, a mania
or all of these expressed in one word — individualism. I was
born with that obsession, and I’ve never seen and do not know now
a cause more worthy, more misunderstood, more seemingly hopeless
and tragically needed.”
–Ayn Rand
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“Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ until you can find
a rock.”
–Will Rogers
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“Congress, our leaders, voted against a proposal to have a
national seven day waiting period to buy a gun. I don’t want to
sound like a Quaker, but when you think about it, is a week a
long time to wait? To see if a former mental patient is
qualified to own an Uzi? Con one, will ya Congress? It takes
three weeks to get a phone!”
–Jimmy Tingle
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“Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking
they hit a triple.”
–Barry Switzer
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“I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn’t poor, I
was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of
myself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh not deprived but rather
underprivileged.) Then they told me that underprivileged was
overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don’t have a dime. But
I have a great vocabulary.”
–Jules Feiffer
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“Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only
way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are
conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits.”
–Dan Barker
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“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
–Derek Bok
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“A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on
sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is
necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be
restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
–Albert Einstein
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“Every time you meet a situation, though you think at the moment
it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the
damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that
forever after you are freer than you were before.”
–Eleanor Roosevelt
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“I think life is really hard sometimes. It’s not easy to wake up
every day and go through what you go through. But the beautiful
moments that you share with people that you love, or even
experience alone, are worth all of the pain and sorrow. Those
moments should be cherished, and I think that’s what music is all
about-to remind people of the beautiful moments that are in
everybody’s life.”
–Charlie Haden
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“Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe
they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and
ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show
the future. If people want to interpret my work as warnings
about too much overpopulation, disease and mechanization in the
future, then that is up to them. I like to combine human beings,
creatures and biomechanics. And I love to work with bones —
they are elemental and function and, after all, are part of human
beings. I have many bones in my home in Zurich, and I study them
and use them as models. Some people say my work is often
depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood,
overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don’t really think
it is. There is hope and a kind of beauty in there somewhere, if
you look for it.”
–H. R. Giger
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“It was all very well to say, ‘Drink me,’ but the wise little
Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. ‘No, I’ll look
first,’ she said, ‘and see whether it’s marked ‘Poison’ or not.’
For she had read several nice little stories about children who
had got burnt and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant
things, all because they would not remember the simple rules
their friends had taught them: that a red-hot poker will burn
you if you hold it too long, and that if you cut your finger very
deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds. And she had never
forgotten that if you drink too much from a bottle marked
‘Poison,’ it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or
later.” (Alice in Wonderland 13-14)
–Lewis Carrol
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“One of the expressions of Western over-reliance on technology
can be seen in the lack of patience in industrial society. When
you deal with technology, everything happens at the touch of a
button. This conditions you to become so impatient that when you
have an emotional or personal crisis, you don’t allow time for
the solution to take effect. This leads to all sorts of rash
responses, like quarrels, fights and so on.”
–the Dali Lama (Lhamo Dhondrub)
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“I agree that the fear of American cultural imperialism is shared
by many people, and I agree with your point about the invasive
nature of television culture. But I wouldn’t draw the next
inference: that this is negative and therefore it must be
stopped. I feel that one should address this influence in a way
that takes away the negative edge through a positive counter-
response. This way, you reinforce and reaffirm your conviction
in the inner values. You harness those beliefs and develop them
with a greater degree of self-awareness. That’s the kind of
response people should have, instead of rejecting technology.”
–the Dali Lama (Lhamo Dhondrub)
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“In contemporary American public culture, the legacy of the
consumer revolution of the 1960s is unmistakable. Today, there
are few things more beloved of our masses than the figure of the
cultural rebel, the defiant individualist resisting the mandates
of the machine civilization. Whether he is an athlete decked out
in a mowhawk and multiple-pierced ears, a policeman who plays by
his own rules, an actor on a motorcycle, a soldier of fortune
with explosive bow and arrow, or a rock star in leather jacket
and sunglasses, the rebel has become the paramount clich� of our
popular entertainment, and the pre-eminent symbol of the system
he is supposed to be subverting. In advertising especially, he
rules supreme.” (The Conquest of Cool)
–Thomas Frank
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“An invasion of armies can be resisted. But not an idea whose
time has come.”
–Victor Hugo
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“Sometimes it seems like we’re all living in some kind of prison,
and the crime is how much we all hate ourselves. It’s good to
get really dressed up once in a while and admit the truth — that
when you really look closely, people are so strange and so
complicated that they’re actually beautiful. Possibly even me.”
–from My So-Called Life
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“I just want them to feel inspired to live on the planet and not
get discouraged with life, and make sure that they pursue what
they feel they ought to. If they want to collect stamps, make
sure they collect stamps 100 percent of the time for 25 years. I
think the most important thing is to try to find work or
something that you love, but it’s also probably the hardest
thing. Life in general is more generic and less artistic. It’s
a hard thing to pull your mind away from the shit and feel
positive about where things are going. It depends on how much TV
news you watch.”
–Ric Ocasek
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“I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and
that our choices of language and verbal tone have something — a
great deal — to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up
speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words by
trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we
can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our
minds.” (Toward a More Feminist Criticism)
–Adrienne Rich
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“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation… With you!
You’ve probably never read a book in your life that wasn’t
written by John Grisham. You don’t get it. People like you are
so content to write-off English. English just isn’t about
analysing stories — if it was, I wouldn’t be like this.
Stories, novels, whatever… reflect something about the
writer… and the culture… and the society that it came from.
It’s a mirror — a mirror to ourselves. And when we do it right,
when we just get it, we know something about ourselves. English
is an understanding of the self. If we can see ourselves
clearly, we know the right decision to make. And if you don’t
know who you are and make the wrong choices, what good is it if
you can make two-hundred and fifty thousand?” (The Open Door)
–Tyler Powell
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“Let me tell you something. We’re all guilty of something.
Cruelty or greed or going sixty-five in a fifty-five mile per
hour zone. But you know what? You want to think of yourself as
the fair haired choir boy, you go ahead. … I’m saying you’ve
got a darkness inside of you. You’ve got to know the darker,
uglier sides of yourself. You’ve got to recognize them so
they’re not constantly sneaking up on you. You’ve got to love
them because they’re a part of you, because along with your
virtues, they make you who you are. Virtue isn’t virtue unless
it slams up against vice so, consequently, your virtue is not
real virtue until it’s been tested… and tempted.”
–from Homicide: Life on the Street
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“A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys
to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks,
our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly
who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we’re
pretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No
matter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person we’re
safe in our own paradise. Our soulmate is someone who shares our
deepest longings, our sense of direction. When we’re two
balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we’ve
found the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life
come to life.” (Bridge 265)
–Richard Bach
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“What was the question? … Oh. Where do I get my crazy ideas?
Answer: sleep-fairy, walk-fairy, shower-fairy. Book-fairy. And
in these last few years, from my wife. Now when I have questions
I ask her and she tells me the answer. If you haven’t already,
I’d suggest you want to find your soulmate, soon as you can.
Next question?” (Bridge 264)
–Richard Bach
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“She didn’t mean to be sexy that moment, but even a winter
nightgown couldn’t hide that lovely outline. When will I outgrow
my simple-minded fascination with the form she had happened to
choose for her body? Never, I thought.” (Bridge 249)
–Richard Bach
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“What a story that would make! How many men and women go through
the same rivers, menaced by the same sharp clichＴ, the same
jagged dangers that have threatened us! If the idea stands up, I
thought, it would be worth uncovering the typewriter! How
Richard-years-ago would have wanted to know: What happens when
we set off searching for a soulmate who doesn’t exist, and find
her?” (Bridge 209)
–Richard Bach
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“We’re different, we’re the same. You thought you’d never find a
word to say to a woman who didn’t fly airplanes. I couldn’t
imagine myself spending time with a man who didn’t love music.
Could it be it’s not as important to be alike as it is to be
curious? Because we’re different, we can have the fun of
exchanging worlds, giving our loves and excitements to each
other. You can learn music, I can learn flying. And that’s only
the beginning. I think it would go on for us as long as we
live.” (Bridge 169)
–Richard Bach
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“If we change in different directions, then we don’t have any
future anyway, do we? I think it’s possible for two people to
change together, to grow together and enrich instead of diminish
each other. The sum of one and one, if they’re the right ones,
can be infinity! But so often one person drags the other down;
one person wants to go up like a balloon and the other’s a dead
weight. I’ve always wondered what it would be like if both
people, if a woman and a man both wanted to go up like balloons!”
(Bridge 168)
–Richard Bach
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“That’s what learning is, after all: not whether we lose the
game, but how we lose and how we’ve changed because of it and
what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to
other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning.” (Bridge 91)
–Richard Bach
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“Here’s how the people live here, in big house-shaped boxes to
keep off ‘rain’ and ‘snow,’ holes cut in the sides so they can
see out. They move around in smaller boxes, painted different
colours, with wheels on the corners. They need this box-culture
because each person thinks of herself and himself as locked in a
box called a ‘body,’ arms and legs, fingers to move pencils and
tools, languages because they’ve forgotten how to communicate,
eyes because they’ve forgotten how to see. Odd little planet.
Wish you were here. Home soon.” (Bridge 85-6)
–Richard Bach
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“Two things I do value a lot, intimacy and the capacity for joy,
didn’t seem to be on anyone else’s list. I felt like the
stranger in a strange land, and decided I’d better not marry the
natives.” (Bridge 76)
–Richard Bach
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“Other people think they know what you are: glamour, sex, money,
power, love. It may be a press agent dream which has nothing to
do with you, maybe it’s something you don’t even like, but that’s
what they think you are. People rush at you from all sides, they
think they’re going to get these things if they touch you. It’s
scary, so you build walls around yourself, thick glass walls
while you’re trying to think, trying to catch your breath. You
know who you are inside, but people outside see something
different. You can choose to become the image, and let go of who
you are, or continue as you are and feel phony when you play the
image.” (Bridge 72)
–Richard Bach
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“There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no
matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we
need to learn; whatever steps we take, they’re necessary to reach
the places we’ve chosen to go.” (Bridge 56)
–Richard Bach
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“Part of us is always the observer, and no matter what, it
observes. It watches us. It does not care if we are happy or
unhappy, if we are sick or well, if we live or die. Its only job
is to sit there on our shoulder and pass judgment on whether we
are worthwhile human beings.” (The Bridge Across Forever 43)
–Richard Bach
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“We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love
too much. And still we long to feel.”
–Jeanette Winterson
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“By the time the average person finishes college he or she will
have taken over 2,600 tests, quizzes and exams. The ‘right
answer’ approach becomes deeply ingrained in our thinking. This
may be fine for some mathematical problems, where there is in
fact only one right answer. The difficulty is that most of life
isn’t that way. Life is ambiguous; there are many right answers –
all depending on what you are looking for. But if you think
there is only one right answer, then you’ll stop looking as soon
as you find one.”
–Roger von Oech
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“You say I have no power? Perhaps you speak truly… but you say
that dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar…
ask yourselves, all of you… what power would hell have if those
here imprisoned were not able to dream of heaven?”
–Neil Gaiman
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“A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.”
–Ralph Waldo Emmerson
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“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby
become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the
abyss gazes also into you.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche
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“If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting
what we’re getting.”
–Stephen Covey
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“It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.”
–Sally Kempton
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“We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become
one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of
thought.”
–Bertrand Russell
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“Happiness is not in our circumstance but in ourselves. It is
not something we see, like a rainbow, or feel, like the heat of a
fire. Happiness is something we are.”
–John B. Sheerin
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“The self is not something that one finds, it is something that
one creates.”
–Thomas Szasz
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“It’s better to be boldly decisive and risk being wrong than to
agonize at length and be right too late.”
–Marilyn Moats Kennedy
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“You’ll never know if you can win until you know you’ve tried
your best… and then it doesn’t matter if you’ve won or not
because you will have improved, and that is winning for
yourself.”
–Carolyn Meroniuk
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“There are threads that help you find your way back, and there
are threads that intend to bring you back. Mind turns to pull,
it’s hard to pull away. I’m always thinking of going back. When
Lot’s wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of
salt. Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but
it’s a poor exchange for losing your self. People do go back,
but they don’t survive, because two realities are claiming them
at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your
heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two
realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can
have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke
on what’s left. Going back after a long time will make you mad,
because the people you left behind do not like to think of you
changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being
indifferent, when you are only different.”
–Jeanette Winterson
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“Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with
stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the
universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of
keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who
tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that
everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true
things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be
proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how
complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there
but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end.
The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it
up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a
game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange
it and at bedtime it’s still a ball of string full of knots.
Nobody should mind. Some people make a lot of money out of it.
Publishers do well, people make a lot of money out of it.
Publishers do well, children, when bright, can come top. It’s an
all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called
history.”
–Jeanette Winterson
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“Since I was born I had assumed that the world ran on very simple
lines, like a larger version of our church. Now I was finding
that even the church was sometimes confused. This was a problem.
But not one I chose to deal with for many years more. The
problem there and then was what was going to happen to me. The
Victoria Hospital was big and frightening, and I couldn’t even
sing to any effect because I couldn’t hear what I was singing.
There was nothing to read except some dental notices and an
instruction leaflet for the X-ray machine. I tried to build an
igloo out of the orange peel but it kept falling down and even
when I stood up I didn’t have an Eskimo to put in it, so I had to
invent a story about ‘How Eskimo Got Eaten’, which made me even
more miserable. It’s always the same with diversions; you get
involved.”
–Jeanette Winterson
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“The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth
which men prefer not to hear.”
–Herbert Sebastian Agar
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“I don’t know because I don’t think about it much in those terms.
I don’t think about what is the greatest thing that ever happened
to me. It seems to me that things don’t last long anyway. Your
high points and your low points. High points don’t last that
long, it’s a high and it happens. It’s great at the moment but
you really can’t live on it. There’s gotta be something higher –
– and lower. But I have all kinds of ups and downs, highs and
lows, I’m always chasing them.”
–Ric Ocasek
——————————————
“There’s only one opinion that counts. It’s your opinion. It
may be wrong, but it’s yours and that’s the one that counts.”
–Filipe Alou
——————————————
“The best thing you can do for a song is to hear it on the radio
and to imagine what it could mean to you and then kinda forget
the words. Just imagine how you felt when you heard it, if it
was one of your songs. If it became one of your songs. If it
meant whatever it meant for you and as soon as you see the
visual, you get a rapid eye movement relationship with the song
instead of an imaginative one. I think that can be dangerous
because I don’t think I’d want to be listening to a song on the
radio and thinking about the video. Whatever that one
interpretation was.”
–Ric Ocasek
——————————————
“Good and evil are not what our parents told us, not what our
church tells us, or our country, not what anybody else tells us!
All of us decide good and evil for ourselves, automatically, by
choosing what we want to do!” (Running)
–Richard Bach
——————————————
“If we must lose wife or husband when we live to our highest
right, we lose an unhappy marriage as well, and we gain
ourselves. But if a marriage is born between two already self-
discovered, what a lovely adventure begins, hurricanes and all!”
(Running)
–Richard Bach
——————————————
“Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient,
helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded,
neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden,
gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy,
beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured,
intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful,
capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does,
however, require us to live with the consequences of our
choices.” (Running)
–Richard Bach
——————————————
“For a moment, off balance, was I annoyed? Anger is always fear,
I thought, and fear is always fear of loss. Would I lose myself
if he made those choices? It took a second to settle down: I’d
lose nothing. They’d be his wishes, not mine, and he’s free to
live as he wants. The loss would come if I dared force him,
tried to live for him and me as well. There’d be disaster worse
than life on a bar stool.” (Running from Safety)
–Richard Bach
——————————————
“Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have
been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that
without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the
sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror
for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in
wonderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I
had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not
afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the
mirror bearer.” (Passion)
–Jeanette Winterson
——————————————
“When I dream of a future in her arms no dark days appear, not
even a head cold, and though I know it’s nonsense I really
believe we would always be happy and that our children would
change the world.” (Passion)
–Jeanette Winterson
——————————————
“I was happy but happy is an adult world. You don’t have to ask
a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not.
Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not.,
Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much
easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree
with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but
there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a
philosopher.” (The Passion)
–Jeanette Winterson
——————————————
“They discovered that even in the face of pain that seems
unbearable, even in the face of pain that wrings the last drop
of blood out of your heart and leaves its scrimshaw tracery on
the inside of your skull, life goes on. And pain grows dull, and
begins to fade.” (Lost Souls)
–Poppy Z. Brite
——————————————
“I can’t heal your pain but I can see it. And you don’t have to
be lost. Not forever.” (Lost Souls)
–Poppy Z. Brite
——————————————
“It is the colour of light, the shape of sound, high in the
evergreens.
It lies suspended in hills, a blue line in a red sky.
I am looking at sound.

I am hearing the brightness of high bluffs and almond trees.
I am tasting the wilderness of lakes, rivers and streams,
caught in an angle of sound.

I am remembering water that glows in the dawn,
the motion tumbled in earth,
life hidden in mounds.

I am dancing in a bright beam of light…
I am remembering love.”
–from Love Jones
——————————————
“Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”
(Atlas 735)

–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“The opening and middle game are vital but a player up two pieces
might have a heart attack and have to forfeit. The end game is
what counts.”
–Pablo Pedro Gomez
——————————————
“The music of [his] Fifth Concerto streamed from his keyboard,
past the glass of the window, and spread through the air, over
the lights of the valley. It was a symphony of triumph. The
notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising
itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they
seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as
its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding
and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the
tension of purpose. It swept space clean and left nothing buy
the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the
sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, bu spoke
in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no
ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song
of an immense deliverance.” (Atlas 1072)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Traditions exist so we can go beyond them.”
–Greg Hawkes
——————————————
“The most important thing to a lot of people, is to belong to
something that’s hip or whatever. To be a part of something
that’s not society, just a clique. And they get real sidetracked
trying to think like everyone else. They don’t realize that you
have to motivate yourself to do things you want to do. Some
people just like going along for the ride. And those are the
kind of people I don’t get along with too well.”
–Ric Ocasek
——————————————
“Once they’re on paper, they’re gone. I like to do as much with
the words, as far as image goes, so that it’s really left open
for a lot of things, even though I remember a specific impression
of something I had at the time. I can’t say a song is about this
or that; in fact, I wouldn’t even want to. I just prefer to have
people live it anyway they want. Because it’s theirs after that.
There’s nothing I can do about it anymore.”
–Ric Ocasek
——————————————
“To be under pressure is inescapable. Pressure takes place
through all the world; war, siege, the worries of state. We all
know men who grumble under these pressures and complain. They
are cowards. They lack splendour. But there is another sort of
man who is under the same pressure but does not complain, for it
is the friction which polishes him. It is the pressure which
refines and makes him noble.”
–St. Augustine
——————————————
“It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how
the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have
done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in
the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat; who strives
valiantly; who errs and may fail again, because there is no
effort without error or shortcoming, but who does actually strive
to do the deeds; who does know the great enthusiasm, the great
devotion; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best,
knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at
worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that
his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know
neither victory nor defeat.”
–Theodore Roosevelt
——————————————
“Through music I either tame my demons or unleash them and allow
them to be what they are. I don’t want the music to be about
provocation, I want the music to bring you to a place where you
feel at home.”
–Michael Franti
——————————————
“You can’t think of risks. I have nothing to lose. You either
make something that you like, or you don’t, and you throw it to
the universe.”
–Mike Myers
——————————————
“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No
barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious
discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without
embarrassment or awkwardness.”
–Helen Keller
——————————————
“Not the senses I have but what I do with them is my kingdom.”
–Helen Keller
——————————————
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a while experience it. Avoiding
danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life
is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
–Helen Keller
——————————————
“People ignore the strange and unusual… I myself am strange and
unusual.”
–from Beetlejuice
——————————————
“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means
the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of
giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to
share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender
hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of
despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief
and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not
healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that
is a friend who cares.”
–Henri Nouwen
——————————————
“Do I avoid looking a stranger in the eyes because I don’t want
to make him uncomfortable, or do I turn my eyes so he can’t look
into me? What is in there that I don’t want him to see?” (Notes)
–Hugh Prather
——————————————
“When someone disagrees with me, I do not have to immediately
start revising what I just said. People don’t want me to always
agree with them. They can sense this is phony. They can sense I
am trying to control them: I am agreeing with them to make them
like me. They feel; ‘I don’t want to exist to like you. I DON’T
exist to like you.'” (Notes)
–Hugh Prather
——————————————
“Sometimes when I generalize I am saying, ‘Let’s pretend I am
God,’ and of course the other person argues that point endlessly.
But I notice that if the other person takes a stand for himself
and states his thoughts as his thoughts, I pay more attention to
what he is saying and look deeper in myself.” (Notes)
–Hugh Prather
——————————————
“Within me is the potential to commit every evil act I see being
committed by other men, and unless I feel this potential I can at
any moment be controlled by these same urges. I am free from
these urges only if I recognize when I am feeling them, and while
feeling them and acknowledging them to be me, choose not to
follow them. Only in this way can I begin to regain the disowned
parts of me. And only in this way can I know what it is I am
criticizing in others.” (Notes)
–Hugh Prather
——————————————
“I sometimes react to making a mistake as if I have betrayed
myself. My fear of making a mistake seems to be based on the
hidden assumption that I am potentially perfect and that if I can
just be very careful I will not fall from heaven. But a
‘mistake’ is a declaration of the way I am, a jolt to the way I
intend, a reminder I am not dealing with the facts. When I have
listened to my mistakes I have grown.” (Notes)
–Hugh Prather
——————————————
“Perfectionism is a slow death. If everything were to just like
I would want it to, just like I would plan for it to, then I
would never experience anything new; my life would be an endless
repetition of stale successes. When I make a mistake I
experience something unexpected.” (Notes)
–Hugh Prather
——————————————
“I can not ‘make my mark’ for all time — those concepts are
mutually exclusive. ‘Lasting effect’ is a self-contradictory
term. Meaning does not exist in the future and neither do I.
Nothing will have meaning ‘ultimately.’ Nothing will even mean
tomorrow what it did today. Meaning changes with the context.
My meaningfulness is here. It is enough that I am of value to
someone today. It is enough that I make a difference now.”
(Notes to Myself)
–Hugh Prather
——————————————
“For some reason, when we’re on tour all our dressing rooms have
blackboards. So we chalk up New Laws of the Universe like, ‘What
is not there, will be,’ and ‘All roads lead to other roads.'”
–Greg Hawkes
——————————————
“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation,
because your character is what you really are, while your
reputation is merely what others think you are.”
–John Wooden
——————————————
“Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of
power are feared; but only men of character are trusted.”
——————————————
“Dignity does not consist in possessing honours, but in deserving
them.”
–Aristotle
——————————————
“You’re all very quiet for people running for their lives.”
–from Press Gang
——————————————
“I laugh, my voice spiralling into Forever
for I have found perfection
and it has always been right here
in the temple of Self”
–Miranda Padgett
——————————————
“People tend to think I’m always aggressive and strong. The
truth is, I’ve always been wracked with self-loathing, which
leads me into terrible, self paralysing depressions. When I go
down to this place, I feel so empty and overwhelmed I can barely
move. But perversely, I find these traits in a man unacceptable
— I can’t stand someone who can out-depress me. You know that
scene in Babe where the farmer clog-dances for the pig?
Sometimes I’m the sick pig and I need a farmer to cheer me up.
And when things get bad, my boyfriend does dance for me, and it
never fails to make me laugh. He’s a pretty snappy dancer.”
–Shirley Manson
——————————————
“Remember, beneath every cynic there lies a romantic, and
probably an injured one.”
–Glenn Beck
——————————————
“Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world
is the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved
without it.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
——————————————
“If there were a mile high mountain of granite, and once every
ten-thousand years a bird flew past and brushed it with a
feather, by the time that mountain was worn away, a fraction of a
second would have passed in the context of eternity.”
–Lois Duncan
——————————————
“People. I knew some of them, but not now. On the moon, I
wander among the many pot holes. Their shadows make me feel
planet-stricken. Display model #1: Clusters of magnetic
liquids. I would like to uncover the mystery of the scrim. Will
I rise to the occasion when it decides to fall by? A tiny
walled-off angel lays an egg. A secret life-the ruminations of a
creature that walks without legs, eats without a mouth, breathes
without lungs, feels without nerves, then divides and conquers.
What happens when you try to squeeze a puddle of gravity in your
hand? It dissolves into hundreds of silver eggs. Me too. The
incubation period was over. Display model #2: People backed up
into a dark corner. Unearthed puzzle, the same the moon all
over. Next stage? Parachute, the final explanation arising as I
make my slow descent.”
–Gillian McCain
——————————————
“Some mornings, it’s just not worth chewing through the leather
straps.”
–Emo Phillips
——————————————
“The happiest person is the person who thinks the most
interesting thoughts.”
–Timothy Dwight
——————————————
“Be happy. It is a way of being wise.”
–Colette
——————————————
“Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of
travelling.”
–M. L. Runbeck
——————————————
“It is better to aim at perfection and miss, than to aim at
imperfection and hit it.”
–T. J. Watson, Sr.
——————————————
“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.”
–Lord Alfred Tennyson
——————————————
“You are what you do when it counts.”
–The Masao
——————————————
“I once complained to my father that I didn’t seem to be able to
do things the same way other people did. Dad’s advice? ‘Margo,
don’t be a sheep. People hate sheep. They eat sheep.'”
–Margo Kaufmann
——————————————
“If you’re never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you
never take any chances.”
–Julia Soorel
——————————————
“Success is a journey, not a destination.”
–Ben Sweetland
——————————————
“There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality,
but there is no ultimate.”
–Stephen King
——————————————
“You are what you are — and not what people think you are.”
–O. W. Polen
——————————————
“Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is
different enough.”
–Arthur Freed
——————————————
“If we’re going to be damned, let’s be damned for who we really
are!”
–from Star Trek: The Next Generation
——————————————
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little
death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I
will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has
gone past over me and through me. And when it has gone past I
will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone
there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” (Dune)
–Frank Herbert
——————————————
“About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people
will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do
for them, and some won’t like you at all.”
–Rita Mae Brown
——————————————
“The difficulties of life are intended to make us better, not
bitter.”
–Mandie Ellingson
——————————————
“An ordinary man can… surround himself with two thousand
books… and thenceforward have at least one place in the world
in which it is possible to be happy.”
–Augustine Birrell
——————————————
“Language exists to conceal true thought.”
–Tallyrand
——————————————
“A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.”
–Thomas Carruthers
——————————————
“People who think honestly and deeply have a hostile attitude
towards the public.”
–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
——————————————
“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But
the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound
truth.”
–Niels Bohr
——————————————
“Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now —
always.”
–Albert Schweitzer
——————————————
“I can promise to be frank, I cannot promise to be impartial.”
–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
——————————————
“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but
if you make them really think, they’ll hate you.”
——————————————
“Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe:
the starry skies above me and the moral law within me.”
–Immanuel Kant
——————————————
“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you’re
still a rat.”
–Lilly Tomlin
——————————————
“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable
game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the
perspective of any other players, to being involved in an obscure
and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank
cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won’t tell you the
rules and who smiles all the time.”
–Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
——————————————
“Okay, I’m sorry I don’t write poems about sunsets and nature and
mystical experiences, I only know what I know; I could write that
the sight of a sunset lit up my mind like Light Brite and I was
enlightened, or that the sun and moon are my mother and father;
but I can’t — I can only write with any semblance of truth about
what contains my simple frame of reference.”
–Gillian McCain
——————————————
“All art must come from experience, or it is as fake as the soul
of the one who writes it.”
–Loriel
——————————————
“If you happen to meet a crocodile, don’t stick your head in its
mouth. Every now and then, and who knows the reason, people
ignore this advice, which is sad because they die, but very
stupid because they were warned. They had a choice. The moral
of the story is this — you can’t afford to be stupid. There are
crocodiles…”
–from Press Gang
——————————————
“The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets
painful is the man who will win.”
–Roger Bannister
——————————————
“Imagine a life without uncertainty… Imagine how dull life
would be if variables assessed for admission to a professional
school, graduate program, or executive training program really
did predict with great accuracy who would succeed and who would
fall. Life would be intolerable — no hope, no challenge.”
–R. M. Dawes
——————————————
“Go your own way. Question everything. Accept nothing. Accept
no dogma, no can’t. There are too many people walking around
thinking they’re sacred cows, and they’re only half right.”
–Rosie Dimanno
——————————————
“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the
man who can’t read them.”
–Mark Twain
——————————————
“Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say
three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and
started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get
off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between
the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does
not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor
for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of
any society of living things.”
–William Golding
——————————————
“Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the
human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial
exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test
we can apply. … We must forget the whole paraphernalia of
social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation,
condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, ‘How would I myself
live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I
went stark staring mad?'”
–William Golding
——————————————
“We spent all night learning an important less. You can’t judge
a sewer by its manhole cover. No sir. People can be very
different under the surface than they might seem. Quiet, mild-
mannered souls might just turn out to be roaring lions of two-
fisted cool. And roaring lions of two-fisted cool just might
have some crippling lobster problems! Listen man, it’s all crazy
down there under the surface. A lost wallet could bite you in
half. A bar of soap could save your life. Egad, a disgusting
mound of muck just might have some very compelling ideas. Do you
dig my ditch?”
–from The Tick
——————————————
“I think that you appreciate that there are extraordinary men and
women, and extraordinary moments when history leaps forward on
the backs of these individuals. That what can be imagined, can
be achieved. That you must dare to dream, but that there is no
substitute for perseverance and hard work, and team work, because
no one gets there alone. And that while we commemorate the
greatness of these events and the individuals who achieve them,
we cannot forget the sacrifice of those who makes these
achievements and leaps possible.”
–from The X-Files
——————————————
“The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that
lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man’s mind. And no
wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he
lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must
be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural
manure. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it
means the capacity for doing without… the average man doesn’t
want to be free. He wants to be safe.”
–H. L. Mencken
——————————————
“Again, we must ask ourselves why the people that brought war,
plane crashes, political corruption, lap dancing and serial
killers to our breakfast tables and into our living rooms are
trying to sooth us with futuristic Web browsers, all buttons and
spinning logos.”
–Michael Van Biesbrouck
——————————————
“I wish that people would take the time to show people that they
are important in their lives, either at work, or at home. Too
many times people take others for granted, and I think that needs
to change. People are so much nicer and willing to help you if
you use those two little words that mean so much… ‘Thank You!'”
–Gina Gillespie
——————————————
“I would wish that people come to realize that we create our own
realities, and all our emotions and thoughts are simply choices.
If we were more accountable as human beings we would experience
far, far less suffering and indifference in the world. It is
considerably easier to place blame outside of ourselves than to
live life from an accountable position.”
–Robert Brincka
——————————————
“I guess some people never change. Or, they quickly change and
then quickly change back.”
–from The Simpsons
——————————————
“There’s an element of contempt for meanings. You want to write
outside the usual framework. You want to dare readers to make a
commitment you know they can’t make. That’s part of [crazed
prose]. There’s also the sense of drowning in information and in
the mass awareness of things. Everybody seems to know
everything. Subjects surface and are totally exhausted in a
matter of days. … The writer is driven by his conviction that
some truths aren’t arrived at so easily, that life is still full
of mystery, that it might be better for you, dear reader, if you
went back to the living section of your newspaper because this is
the dying section and you don’t really want to be here. This
writer is working against the age and so he feels some
satisfaction at not being widely read. He is diminished by an
audience.”
–Don DeLillo
——————————————
“Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I’d
feel terrible if I didn’t tell you what I was thinking,
especially at a time like this.” (Noise)
–Don DeLillo
——————————————
“We start our lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the
world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in
this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a
failed scheme but that’s not the point. To plot is to affirm
life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most
particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are
an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state
funeral. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation
holds its breath. The efforts of a huge and powerful government
are brought to bear on a ceremony that will shed the last trace
of chaos. If all geos well, if they bring it off, some natural
law of perfection is obeyed. The nation is delivered from
anxiety, the deceased’s life is redeemed, life itself is
strengthened, reaffirmed.” (Noise)
–Don DeLillo
——————————————
“Just because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend
belief in the evidence of our senses.” (White Noise)
–Don DeLillo
——————————————
“Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the
middles?”
–Julio Cort�zar
——————————————
“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already
earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake,
since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace
to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at
command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance,
how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is;
I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an
action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war
is nothing but an act of murder.”
–Albert Einstein
——————————————
“That is the future, and it is probably nearer than we think.
But our primary problem as universities is not engineering that
future. We must rise above the obsession with quantity of
information and speed of transmission, and recognize that the key
issue for us is our ability to organize this information once it
has been amassed — to assimilate it, find meaning in it, and
assure its survival for use by generations to come.”
–Vartan Gregorian
——————————————
“The highest form of guitar soloing is saying something in 16
bars and not wasting a note. You can’t aspire to anything finer
in a pop record. I’ve never gone for gratuitous soloing. The
most predictable thing in the world is to wank on guitar for days
on end. It’s like weight lifting. I’m not impressed by it.”
–Elliot Easton
——————————————
“Little problems are big problems for little minds”
–Tom Zimmerman
——————————————
“Such is the stuff of waking nightmares, incipient madness, the
sort of now-bewildered but soon-to-be-deranged thoughts that
cause once well-balanced people to peek under their beds at
night, suspect that their phones are tapped, and, in time, become
certain that sinister forces are monitoring their every move.
Maybe it’s the government, maybe it’s the Trilateral Commission,
maybe it’s the saucer people. You can’t trust anyone because
anyone and everyone may be one of Them or on of Their Agents.
And pretty soon you begin writing long letters to the editor of
Scientific American, or maybe you don’t because the editors are
probably part of the conspiracy too. And you think about lining
your room with aluminum foil to keep the radio waves out, and at
night you roam the streets spray-painting mystic symbols on the
walls to repel strange forces, and all the while you gibber to
yourself and what you say makes sense to you if to no one else,
and in the end you put your belongings in a shopping bad, better
to be mobile, and you look for a dark place you can hide during
the daylight hours, because They are out there, and They are
searching, and They want you in their crosshairs… The
headshrinkers call it paranoia, and when it gets bad they put you
away. Because, after all, people who think everyone in the world
wants to kill them can be dangerous.”
–Joseph R. Garber
——————————————
“I cannot feel good about being a woman unless you feel bad about
being a moan. I cannot be proud of being black unless you are
ashamed of being white. I cannot respect myself for being gay
unless you are embarrassed that you are straight. Tolerance has
been put by the boards; it is a stale and bitter thing and we
will have none of it. Equality, likewise; is condescending at
best and in truth intended to demean. If I am to achieve the
inner harmony and self-respect that is my due, it will not
suffice for you and I to be equals. No! Nothing less than
superiority will make me happy. And to ensure that I make my
point, I shall commend your libraries to the flames, rewrite your
histories, purge your dictionaries, and arm the thought police
with power to enforce political correctness in all speech and
apprehension.”
–Joseph R. Garber
——————————————
“I want you to be able to say anything. Even what you don’t
mean.” (Notes to Myself)
–Hugh Prather
——————————————
“It’s a pity if someone… has to console himself for the wreck
of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work
embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of
reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart’s ocean,
but I am such a one, and there you have it. … It is really
amazing how famous I am to those few who truly comprehend what
I’m about. I am the Voice of Suffering and I cannot be
consoled.”
–Leonard Cohen
——————————————
“Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.”
–General George Patton
——————————————
“Be willing to make decisions. That’s the most important quality
in a good leader. Don’t fall victim to what I call the Ready-
Aim-Aim-Aim Syndrome. You must be willing to fire.”
–T. Boone Pickens
——————————————
“Hello everyone. I suppose you think that nothing much is
happening at the moment. Well, that’s what I want to talk to you
all about; endings. Now, endings normally happen at the end.
But as we all know, endings are just beginnings. You know, once
these things really get started, it’s jolly hard to stop them
again. However, as we have all come this far, I think, under the
circumstances the best solution is that we all just keep going.
Let’s keep this going in sight, never an ending. Let’s remember
that this world wants fresh beginnings. I feel here, in this
country, and throughout the world, we are crying out for
beginnings, beginnings. We never want to hear this word
‘endings’. I know we all want to sit down. I know you want to
take it easy. Of course we’re looking for the good. Of course
we’re looking for the fresh start.”
–Mike Oldfield
——————————————
“Whenever someone annoys me, I create a file with his or her name
on it and drag it to my Mac’s trash icon. If I’m really angry, I
empty the trash, and whoever was bugging me disappears into the
void.”
–Margo Kaufman
——————————————
“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful
tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean; neither more nor
less.'” (Through the Looking-Glass 164)
–Lewis Carroll
——————————————
“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s
affections, and the truth of imagination.”
–John Keats
——————————————
“To approach telepathy, you start with empathy and crank that up
as high as you can. You care about each other. You feel each
others’s joy and pain. You make each other laugh, and help each
other cry. You work hard at trusting each other, so that it’s
safe to dismantle the fortress around your ego. You forgive each
other anything that stands between you, and try to bring out each
other’s best, you work very hard at hosing all the bull-shit out
of your head so that it’s clean enough for guests, silencing all
the demons in your subconscious so that it’s quiet enough to hear
people thinking at you, and most of all you find ways to make
that work so much fun that you keep on working. You stick
together and love each other, and keep growing.”
–Spider Robinson
——————————————
“You are what you do when it counts”
–John Steakley
——————————————
“I once listed all the good things I did over the past year, and
then turned them into resolution form and backdated them. That
was a good feeling.”
–Robert Fulghum
——————————————
“The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their
commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen
field of endeavour.”
–Vince Lombardi
——————————————
“Create a vision and never let the environment, other people’s
beliefs, or the limits of what has been done in the past shape
your decisions. Ignore conventional wisdom.”
–Anthony Robbins
——————————————
“Determine what you want, then resolve to pay the price to get
it.”
–Bunker Hunt
——————————————
“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin
— real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way,
something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time
still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin.
At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”
–Fr. Alfred D’Souza
——————————————
“And as cliche as it may sound
I’d like to raise another round
And if you bottles empty
Help yourself to mine
Thank you for your time
And here’s to life.”
–The Refreshments
——————————————
“And who ever said there’s nothing new under the sun
Never thought much about individuals
But he’s dead anyways.”
–The Refreshments
——————————————
“All great truths begin as blasphemies.”
–George Bernard Shaw
——————————————
“You see things and say, ‘Why?’, but I dream things and say, ‘Why
not?'”
–George Bernard Shaw
——————————————
“Truth is not determined by majority vote.”
–Doug Gwyn
——————————————
“The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our
wits to grow sharper.”
–Bertrand Russel
——————————————
“It is not what they take away from you that counts. It’s what
you do with what you have left.”
–Hubert Humphrey
——————————————
“People who fail to achieve their goals usually get stopped by
frustration. They allow frustration to keep them from taking the
necessary actions that would support them in achieving their
desire. You get through this roadblock by plowing through
frustration, taking each setback as feedback you can learn from,
and pushing ahead. I doubt you’ll find many successful people who
have not experienced this. All successful people learn that
success is buried on the other side of frustration.”
–Anthony Robbins
——————————————
“If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t
lead anywhere.”
–Unkn
——————————————
“This great misfortune — to be incapable of solitude.”
–Jean de la Bruyere
——————————————
“There is no such thing as a ‘self-made’ man. We are made up of
thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for
us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into
the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our
success.”
–George Matthew Adams
——————————————
“Our lives improve only when we take chances — and the first and
most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.”
–Walter Anderson
——————————————
“There are two types of people — those who come into a room and
say, ‘Well, here I am!’ and those who come in and say, ‘Ah, there
you are.'”
–Frederick L Collins
——————————————
“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is to
try to please everyone.”
–Bill Cosby
——————————————
“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of
improving, and that’s your own self.”
–Aldous Huxley
——————————————
“I take a simple view of life: keep your eyes open and get on
with it.”
–Sir Laurence Olivier
——————————————
“The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common.
Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the
facts to fit their views… which can be very uncomfortable if
you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”
–from Doctor Who
——————————————
“I’m old old enough to play baseball or football. I’m not eight
yet. My Mom told me when you start baseball, you aren’t going to
be able to run that fast because you had an operation. I told
Mom I wouldn’t need to run fast. When I play baseball, I’ll just
hit them out of the park. Then I’ll be able to walk.”
–Edward J. Mcgrath Jr.
——————————————
“It’s possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism
when they come separately. When you get all three together it’s
probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity.”
–P. D. James
——————————————
“Is there a home, a home for me?
Where the people stay until eternity?
Is there a road that winds up, underneath the big green tree?
Is there a home, a home for me?”
–Stan Ridgway
——————————————
“I wanna float with you on a cumulus cloud
I wanna take you far away from this maddening crowd
You can scratch up my back with your long fingernails
We’ll drink some weird wine and eat psychedelic snails.”
–Stan Ridgway
——————————————
“My angel, my all, my very self… my thoughts go out to you, my
Immortal Beloved, now and then joyfully, then sadly, waiting to
learn whether or not fate will hear us — I can live only wholly
with you or not at all… Be calm — love me — today —
yesterday — what tearful longings for you — you — you — my
life — my all — farewell. Oh continue to love — never
misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved. Ever thine.
Ever mine. Ever ours.”
–Ludwig van Beethoven
——————————————
“All right, they’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in
front of us, they’re behind us. They can’t get away this time!”
–General “Chesty” Puller
——————————————
“An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.”
–Mohandas Gandhi
——————————————
“True morality consists, not in following the beaten track, but
in finding out the true path for ourselves and in fearlessly
following it.”
–Mohandas Gandhi
——————————————
“You have no warning when your life’s about to change. No clap
of thunder. No sign. Maybe a premonition, a fear, but we’re
scared most of the time, aren’t we? So how do you know when it
means something? How do you know when you’re just not being
paranoid?”
–from Homicide: Life on the Street
——————————————
“He was polite to his elders, who disliked him. Whatever his
elders told him to do, he did. They told him to look before he
leaped, and he always looked before he leaped. They told him
never to put off until the next day what he could do the day
before, and he never did. He was told to honour his father and
his mother, and he honoured his father and his mother. He was
told that he should not kill, and he did not kill, until he got
into the Army. Then he was told to kill, and he killed. He
turned the other cheek on every occasion and always did unto
others exactly as he would have had others do unto him. When he
gave to charity, his left hand never knew what his right hand was
doing. He never once took the name of the Lord his God in vain,
committed adultery or coveted his neighbour’s ass. In fact, he
loved his neighbour and never even bore false witness against
him. [His] elders disliked him because he was such a flagrant
nonconformist.” (Catch 22)
–Joseph Heller
——————————————
“Well, maybe it is true, maybe a long life does have to be filled
with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in
that event, who wants one?” (Catch 22)
–Joseph Heller
——————————————
“Practice random acts of independence and senseless acts of
freedom.”
–Professor Zen
——————————————
“Stand up for yourself. If you don’t then why should I?”
–Professor Zen
——————————————
“I have a novel way to eliminate crime as we know it. Instead of
passing sentences of a certain number of years, why don’t we
educate the inmates and not let them out until they have
maintained at least a C average from a grade school to a high
school curriculum. Do you know how many people we could actually
keep in prison and for how long? Think about it…”
–Professor Zen
——————————————
“‘You’ll get over it…’ It’s the clichＴ that cause the
trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever.
You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The
pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How
could it? The articularness of someone who mattered enough to
grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart
is in the shape of you and no one else can fit it. Why would I
want them to?” (Body)
–Jeanette Winterson
——————————————
“Yes we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in
serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn’t mind washing up
beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the
paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss
you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don’t want to
lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and
easy and doesn’t bother to check her diary when we arrange to
meet.” (Body)
–Jeanette Winterson
——————————————
“Poor me. There’s nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there?
Wallowing is sex for depressives.” (Body)
–Jeanette Winterson
——————————————
“I was in the last spasms of an affair with a Dutch girl called
Inge. She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist.
This was hard for her because it meant she couldn’t blow up
beautiful buildings. She knew the Eiffel Tower was a hideous
symbol of phallic oppression but when ordered by her commander to
detonate the lift so that no-one should unthinkingly scale an
erection, her mind filled with young romantics gazing over Paris
and opening aerograms that said Je t’aime.” (Body)
–Jeanette Winterson
——————————————
“Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three
hundred and I will honour every one.” (Written on the Body)
–Jeanette Winterson
——————————————
“You will never find time for anything. If you want time you
must make it.”
–Charles Buxton
——————————————
“We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don’t,
it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the
preconceptions.”
–Jessamyn West
——————————————
“Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people.’
People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are
at war….Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be
gratified at the expense of the rest.”
–C. S. Lewis
——————————————
“My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions, but in
the fewness of my wants.”
–J. Brotherton
——————————————
“The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an
open one.”
–Malcom Forbes
——————————————
“Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get
ahead of ourselves – to break our own records, to outstrip our
yesterday by our today.”
–Stewart B. Johnson
——————————————
“Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”
–Richard Bach
——————————————
“Obviously, where art has it over life is in the matter of
editing. Life can be seen to suffer from a drastic lack of
editing. It stops too quick, or else it goes on too long.
Worse, its pacing is erratic. Some chapters are little more than
a few sentences in length, while others stretch into volumes.
Life, for all its raw talent, has little sense of structure. It
creates amazing textures, but it can’t be counted on for snappy
beginnings or good endings either. Indeed, in many cases no
ending is provided at all.
–Larry McMurtry
——————————————
“There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe
everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from
thinking.”
–Theodore Rubin
——————————————
“We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define
us.”
–Virginia Satir
——————————————
“Whether they really believe in their brave new world, however,
is ultimately beside the point. They’re building it. And in the
friction-free future, jacked into paradise, we’ll have the
‘liberty’ of living (or rather, or buying the illusion of
living), through the benevolent offices of a middleman as nearly
omnipotent as god himself. Freedom? A more perfect captivity is
difficult to imagine.”
–Mark Slouka
——————————————
“The future is green and low tech. We’ll watch aquariums, not
TVs.”
–A. Pavletich
——————————————
“We all are where we are because we want to be there.”
–from What Happened Was…
——————————————
“The future lay sparkling ahead of us and we thought that we’d
know each other forever.”
–from Sleepers
——————————————
“The most important thing about a man is what he believes in the
depth of his being. This is the thing that makes him what he is,
the thing that organizes him and feeds him; the thing that keeps
him going in the face of untoward circumstances; the thing that
gives him resistance and drive.”
–Hugh Stevenson Tigner
——————————————
“If you don’t have solid beliefs you cannot build a stable life.
Beliefs are like the foundation of a building, and they are the
foundation to build your life upon.”
–Alfred A. Montapert
——————————————
“What orbit of the planets has put you and me in this place, at
this moment? Where time takes a breath, and we dance on the edge
of our dreams?”
–from a Millennia commercial
——————————————
“You know one of the ways that movies are still better than
playback? Because the music comes up, there’s credits, and you
always know when it’s over.”
–from Strange Days
——————————————
“There’s more to light than the opposite of dark.”
–Ric Ocasek
——————————————
“There’s a new and virulent cultural virus ripping through the
world… The symptoms of those infected include attacks of
optimism, strong feelings of community, lower stress levels and
outbreaks of pronoia — the sneaking feeling that someone is
conspiring behind their backs to help them.”
–Jules Marshall
——————————————
“Machines will never be able to give the thinking process a model
of thought itself, since machines are not mortal. What gives
humans access to the symbolic domain of value and meaning is the
fact that we die.”
–RＨis Debray
——————————————
“The task of thinking is based upon selection and weeding out;
remembering everything is weirdly similar to forgetting
everything. Most things that people do shouldn’t be remembered.
Maybe forgetting is good.”
–Gary Wolf
——————————————
“May the best from your past be the worst of your future.”
–from The Long Kiss Goodnight
——————————————
“When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things
that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that
simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the
Uncarved Block: Life is Fun.”
–Benjamin Hoff
——————————————
“I think that the most important thing to teach children in an
environmentally conscious age is alternative views of nature.
They must be shown how our interpretation of natural systems is
often completely dependent not on what is there but on what kind
of box we draw around the data. And if they are going to be
smarter than their parents, then schoolchildren must think
subversively about accepted wisdoms concerning natural systems.”
–Stephen Strauss
——————————————
“Progress involves risks. You can’t steal second with your foot
on first.”
–Fred Wilcox
——————————————
“Don’t save a pitcher for tomorrow. Tomorrow it may rain.”
–Leo Durocher
——————————————
“It’s like most anything. If you want to be a loser, there’s
always a way to dwell on the negative. If you want to win,
there’s always a way to think positively.”
–Tony La Russa
——————————————
“If you are content with yourself, you’ll stop taking those
little steps forward and begin taking big steps backward.”
–Greg Maddux
——————————————
“Bury me above the clouds, all the way from here
Take away the things I need, take away my fear
Hide me in a hollow sound, happy ever more
Everything I had to give, gave them long before.”
–Garbage
——————————————
“Crashing silent, broken down, falling into night
Who gave up and who gave in, I’ll go without a fight
Cut me down or cut me dead, cut me in or out
Kiss me blind time after time, take away my doubt.”
–Garbage
——————————————
“I bit my tongue and stood in line
With not much to believe in
I bought into what I was sold
And ended up with nothing.”
–Garbage
——————————————
“I only smile in the dark
My only comfort is the night gone black
I didn’t accidentally tell you that
I’m only happy when it rains.”
–Garbage
——————————————
“A couple things about looking into a mirror: First off, you get
to see anybody sneaking up behind you, second, it’s two-
dimensional and you don’t get to see the whole of yourself,
third, mirrors are flat and very often cold, fourth, when things
get hot and intense, it’s the mirror that steams up, not your
eyes.”
–Greg Webster
——————————————
“A couple months ago I noticed that I hadn’t really laughed for a
long time… That’s come back quite well, I’m enjoying more
things… I’d say that I’ve almost completely recovered from the
past few years, still cynical, but not really bitter.”
–Greg Webster
——————————————
“[Alan Berg’s] memory haunts many people, even those who never
heard him on the radio, because his death could be read as a
message: Be cautious, be prudent, be bland, never push anybody,
never say what you really think, offer yourself as a hostage to
the weirdos even before they make the first move. These days, a
lot of people are opposed to the newfound popularity of ‘trash
television,’ and no doubt they are right, and the hosts of these
shows are shameless controversy-mongers. But at least they are
not intimidated. Of what use is freedom of speech to those who
fear to offend?”
–Roger Ebert
——————————————
“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those, who in times
of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
–Dante Alighieri
——————————————
“People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are
precious than that they are true.”
–George Santayana
——————————————
“I would step in the way of a bullet if it were aimed at my
husband. It is not self-sacrifice to die protecting that which
you value: If the value is great enough, you do not care to
exist without it. This applies to any alleged sacrifice for
those one loves.”
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.
The game begins in the spring when everything else begins again,
and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and
evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and
leaves you to face fall alone.
–A. Bartlett Giamatti

——————————————
“It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced
to ask who you are.”
–Jean Baudrillard
——————————————
“Tomorrow isn’t promised to any of us.”
–Kirby Puckett
——————————————
“Happiness isn’t a static thing; it’s the quest for happiness
that allows us to think we’re happy, while we continue to search
for more.”
–Greg Webster
——————————————
“We can’t all be Einstein (because we don’t all play the violin).
At the very least, we need a sort of street-smart science: the
ability to recognize evidence, gather it, assess it, and act on
it.”
–Judith Stone
——————————————
“Over the last decade or so ‘wars’ have been proclaimed, in turn,
on teen pregnancy, dropping out, drugs, and most recently
violence. The trouble with such campaigns, though, is that they
come too late, after the targeted problem has reached epidemic
proportions and taken firm root in the lives of the young. They
are crisis intervention, the equivalent of solving a problem by
sending an ambulance to the rescue rather than giving an
inoculation that would ward off the disease in the first place.
Instead of more such ‘wars,’ what we need is to follow the logic
of prevention, offering our children the skills for facing life
that will increase their chances of avoiding any and all of these
fates.”
–Daniel Goldman
——————————————
“Functionless art is simply tolerated vandalism.”
–Type O Negative
——————————————
“That, of course, is the devil’s bargain of addiction: a short-
term good feeling in exchange for the steady meltdown of one’s
life.”
–Daniel Goldman
——————————————
“What we call human nature in actuality is human habit.”
–Jewel Kilcher
——————————————
“Why go to a museum and look at paintings if you can paint your
own painting. I mean, do things for yourself. I mean, do you
have somebody come in a sleep with your wife for you? Do you pay
somebody to eat your food for you? I mean, do things for
yourself. That’s what life’s about. There’s so many people
doing things they hate, I mean you have people running the
country who all they care about is keeping their jobs not doing
their jobs. There’s so little real love in any of the work that
I see.”
–from What Happened Was…
——————————————
“To look this way is to see.
To see is to have vision.
To have vision is to understand.
To understand is to know.
To know is to become.
To become is to live fully.
To live fully is to matter.
And to matter is to become light.
And to become light is to be loved.
And to be loved is to burn.
And to burn is to exist.
Off and on.”
–Robert Fulghum
——————————————
“If you notice phrases, ideas, and anecdotes that closely
resemble those that appear elsewhere in my writing, it’s not a
matter of sloppy editing. I’m repeating myself. I’m reshuffling
words in the hope that just once I might say something exactly
right. And I’m still wrestling with dilemmas that are not easily
resolved or easily dismissed. I run at them again and again
because I am not finished with them. Any may never be. Work-in-
progress on a life-in-progress is what my writing is about. And
some progress in the work is enough to keep it going on.”
–Robert Fulghum
——————————————
“You yourself are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you
feel as though you almost don’t exist. I’ve experienced this
time and again. My hand seems devoid of myself, and I have
nothing to do with what is happening. I just sit there watching
in a state of awe and wonderment. And it just flows out by
itself.”
–Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
——————————————
“Change is the only thing that you can expect.”
–Jaymi Wiley
——————————————
“How can you worry about pleasing people [critics] and what
they’re going to think? How can you do anything creative if the
whole thing is motivated by trying to please somebody else? To
me, the whole idea of what I thought art, or music, or anything
creative was about pleasing yourself and hoping that whatever
you’re creating will reach someone else who’ll see it on that
level. To worry about someone picking it apart and discussing it
element for element, and trying to knock you down or weaken it in
any way doesn’t amount to anything but a waste of paper.”
–Elliot Easton
——————————————
“They’re caught where there’s no way out or where you can’t see
out. What are you going to do about it? I don’t have the
answer. If I did there would be no insane asylums. But I see a
lot of people, a lot of my friends in the same predicament. Many
times in my life, I was there myself.”
–Ric Ocasek
——————————————
“There is really nothing you must be.
And there is nothing you must do.
There is really nothing you must have.
And there is nothing that you must know.
There is really nothing you must become.
However, it helps to understand that fire burns, and when it
rains, the earth gets wet…”
–Robert Fulghum
——————————————
“Making a living and having a life are not the same thing.
Making a living and making a life that’s worthwhile are not the
same thing. Living the good life and living a good life are not
the same thing. A job title doesn’t even come close to answering
the question ‘What do you do?'”
–Robert Fulghum
——————————————
“Even if there’s no such thing as free will, we have to treat
each other as if there were free will in order to live together
in society. Because otherwise, every time somebody does
something terrible, you can’t punish him, because he can’t help
it, because his genes or his environment or God made him do it,
and every time somebody does something good, you can’t honour him
because he was a puppet, too. If you think that everybody around
you is a puppet why bother talking to them at all? Why even try
to plan anything or create anything, since everything you plan or
create or desire or dream of is just acting out the script your
puppeteer built into you.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts
us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our
will, then he’s responsible for every choice we make. God, our
genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code
at an ancient terminal — there’s no way free will can ever exist
if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“Isn’t it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another
without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in
our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality. My
wife. My friend. My lover. My outrageous and annoying computer
personality who’s about to be shut off at the behest of a half-
crazy girl with OCD on a planet that I never heard of and how
will I live without [her] when she’s gone?”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“I have too many secrets. For all these years I’ve been a
speaker for the dead, uncovering secrets and helping people to
live in the light of truth. Now I no longer tell anyone half of
what I know, because if I told the whole truth there would be
fear, hatred, brutality, murder, war.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way,
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We’re little black sheep who’ve gone astray,
Baa-aa-aa!
Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha’ mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Bah!”
–Rudyard Kipling
——————————————
“A strange thing happened then. The Speaker agreed with her that
she had made a mistake that night, and she knew when he said the
words that it was true, that his judgement was correct. And yet
she felt strangely healed, as if simply speaking her mistake were
enough to purge some of the pain of it. For the first time,
then, she caught a glimpse of what the power of speaking might
be. It wasn’t a matter of confession, penance, and absolution,
like the priests offered. It was something else entirely.
Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was
no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the
mistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake
again because she had become someone else, someone less afraid,
someone more compassionate.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“How clever of me. I have found such a pathway into hell that I
can never get back out.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“But I hope that in the lives of [the characters], you will find
stories worth holding in your memory, perhaps even in your heart.
That’s the transaction that counts more than best-seller lists,
royalty statements, awards, or reviews. Because in the pages of
this book, you and I will meet one-on-one, my mind and yours, and
you will enter a world of my making and dwell there, not as a
character that I control, but as a person with a mind of your
own. You will make of my story what you need it to be, if you
can. I hope my tale is true enough and flexible enough that you
can make it into a world worth living in.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“The danger that keeps me just a little frightened with every
book I write, however, is that I’ll overreach myself once too
often and try to write a story that I’m just plain not talented
or skilful enough to write. That’s the dilemma every storyteller
faces. It is painful to fail. But it is far sadder when a
storyteller stops wanting to try.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“Remember, you can think for yourself, or just surrender your
mind. It’s your call, but don’t expect me to pay your bills if
you decide to surrender.”
–Professor Zen
——————————————
“You can walk as carefully as you want through a mine field; it
is still a mine field. But it’s also true that if you step up to
the plate worrying that you’re going to strike out, the odds are
that you’re going to strike out. Not doing a large ambitious
work because you’re convinced that Danger Lurks Around Every
Corner, the old ‘I might be dead this time next year,’ is a waste
of the Inner Radiance that found you. It’s like life insurance.
It’s betting against yourself. It’s blowing out your own flame
before someone beats you to it.”
–Dave Sim
——————————————
“I think the more rational explanation is that the excision of a
five-to-six-foot leech from the surface of a human body means
that that body is going to have more of its own blood in its own
veins. Unless the leech finds another body, it is going to go
hungry.”
–Dave Sim
——————————————
“These are ideas. I could say that they just came to me, but it
would be more accurate to say that I went to them. Ideas — and
new connections between ideas — lead you away from commonly held
perceptions of reality. Ideas lead you out here. Ideas lead you
into the darkness.”
–Dave Sim
——————————————
“Once a profound truth has been seen, it cannot be ‘unseen’.
There’s no ‘going back’ to the person you were. Even if such a
possibility did exist… why would you want to?”
–Dave Sim
——————————————
“The problem is maddening. The thing you seek is so close, you
feel you could reach out and touch it. You feel it is your
immutable destiny to do so. You have not come this far and at
such a cost merely to turn around and go back. There is a
solution. Of this you are certain. Now, no longer a game of
mass, a game of destiny, it has become, instead a contest of
wills. You focus on That Which You Seek as if your gaze alone
might bring it closer or narrow the distance between you. Just
as it feels as if your mind itself will explode from the
strain…”
–Dave Sim
——————————————
“For the first time in your conscious memory; for the first time
in fact, since your were a baby; a single tear, full and warm,
rolled down your right cheek and you fell into a very deep and
entirely dreamless slumber…”
–Dave Sim
——————————————
“A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little
courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whom
timidity prevented from making a first effort.”
–Sydney Smith
——————————————
“All courage is a form of constancy. It is always himself that a
coward abandons first. After this all other betrayals come.”
–Cormac McCarthy
——————————————
“There is a theory of societal evolution that goes like this:
Barbarians invent a new culture. A middle class emerges to
manage and help perpetuate the culture. An aristocracy
eventually develops out of the middle class and devotes their
energies to making things comfortable for themselves. Finally, a
new set of barbarians smash everything apart and destroy the
status quo so that the process must start all over again.”
–Alan Cross
——————————————
“The secret of the world is this: the world is entirely circular
and you will go round and round endlessly, never finding what you
want, unless you have found what you really want inside yourself.
When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star;
rather it will guide you to where you want to go. It’s a
reference point, not an end in itself, even though you seem to be
following it. So it is with the world. It will only ever lead
you back to yourself. The end of all your exploring will be to
cease from exploration and know the place for the first time.”
–Jeanette Winterson
——————————————
“Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of
prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation
from prejudice.”
–Allan Bloom
——————————————
“Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the
feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions
may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the
desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgement shall
still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote
in every decision.”
–Charlotte Bronte
——————————————
“People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little
use in chess.”
–Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort
——————————————
“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.
There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the
intellect.”
–Oscar Wilde
——————————————
“And that’s the real incentive, isn’t it? It’s not so much the
fact that you get to bask in their God’s love that’s the selling
point, it’s that you avoid damnation. Think of it like Coke
putting out an ad that says ‘Snapple causes muscle spasms, Pepsi
is infected with AIDS, and tap-water gives you cancer. So drink
Coke. Not only do we taste good, we’re the only alternative to
pain and suffering.’ It’s actually a pretty good marketing tool.
Humanity, by nature, is an ambivalent animal, given to fits of
inertia, and we’re more than likely to sit on our noncommittal
behinds unless there’s a bogeyman to chase us out of our chairs.”
–Greg Bulmash
——————————————
“No, life may not be easy, it can be lonely. Full of people we
think we know, but barely comprehend. Yet we must always
remember: it’s the challenges that define us best, and the
obstacles that illuminate what we’re truly capable of. We must
welcome adversity and embrace struggle, and no matter what we get
from life, never give less than 100 percent. Of course, at the
end of every battle weary day, we fold ourselves into peaceful
darkness and find comfort in those gentle words… good night.”
–from Profit
——————————————
“I’m pretty good at inventing phrases — you know, the sort of
words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you’d sat on
a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they’re about
something hypnopaedically obvious. But that doesn’t seem enough.
It’s not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with
them ought to be good too.”
–Aldous Huxley
——————————————
“I’m thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that
I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it —
only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the
power.”
–Aldous Huxley
——————————————
“[They] like to pretend they live in a universe where there are
no facts, everything is a matter of opinion, and all opinions are
equally valid. And, of course, they do live in just such a
universe. Unfortunately, it exists entirely inside their own
poorly-stocked minds.”
–Dr. Rory Coker
——————————————
“The notion of saving the planet has nothing to do with
intellectual honesty or science. The fact is that the planet was
here long before us and will be here long after us. The planet
is running fine. What people are talking about is saving
themselves and saving their middle-class lifestyles and saving
their cash flow.”
–Lynn Margulis
——————————————
“Welcome to prekindergarten! You will not die if you discover
that there are more lines out there than just your own. In fact,
you’ll discover that you will have an advantage if you know more
of them!”
–Bernice Johnson Reagon
——————————————
“This means that people must somehow get free of this incredible
obsession — generated by governments and the economy and the
guilt around sex and pleasure — that they must become
workaholics. The workaholic fascination is an illusion and a
trap that people fall into without even realizing it. What’s
needed is more time for inner work, less time for television;
detachment from all the myths we’re steeped in; and the discovery
of a language that will create harmony between a man and a
woman.”
–Margo Anand
——————————————
“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most
undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make
what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving
better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing.
Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
–Aldous Huxley
——————————————
“We’re like a real family. Opinionated, argumentative, holding
grudges, challenging each other. We challenge each other to be
better than we are. That kind of thing doesn’t happen at
barbecues, at ball games, it happens on the job we’re supposed to
do. On the case. Put down the murder. The work itself is the
most important thing. What we do is important. We speak for
those that can no longer speak for themselves. And you’re not
gonna ever find anything like that anywhere. Not in vice, and
not patrolling the grounds at Disneyland.”
–from Homicide: Life on the Street
——————————————
“When I tell any truth it is not for the sake of convincing those
who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do.”
–William Blake
——————————————
“There are truths which one can only say after having won the
right to say them.”
–Jean Cocteau
——————————————
“Mere longevity is a good thing for those who watch life from the
sidelines. For those who play the game, an hour may be a year, a
single day’s work, an achievement for eternity.”
–Gabriel Heatter
——————————————
“To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.”
–William Blake
——————————————
“Mock the devil, and he will flee from thee.”
–Bono
——————————————
“I have discovered that this world is harsh, cruel and nasty
enough without writing off entire classes of individuals on the
basis of their colour or national origin. There are enough
people in the world who can be judged on the basis of their
actions that we don’t need to judge others merely on the basis of
their colour or nationality.”
–Robert Chase
——————————————
“What [he] is apparently objecting to is that not everyone takes
his beliefs seriously. Indeed, some don’t seem to respect his
beliefs at all, and actually poke fun at them. Well, I have news
for [him]: that’s the nature of a free society. Opinions don’t
necessarily merit respect; they must earn respect in the
marketplace of ideas.”
–Jeffrey Shallit
——————————————
“[He] seems to want it both ways: the freedom to hold and
express beliefs, and immunity from criticism for those beliefs.
This is the kind of attitude that leads inexorably to
totalitarianism. It is to be decried, particularly in a
university environment where the search for truth necessitates
that no belief be treated as sacred or above scrutiny.”
–Jeffrey Shallit
——————————————
“I think it would be nice if you could include a greater slant to
the growing, happy side of your persona — it wouldn’t be too
hard to assume (as I erroneously did at first) that you were a
depression-racked, paranoid loony. Not so much from this issue,
but as a general pattern from earlier issues. I’ve learnt,
though. You’re not paranoid.”
–Julian Barton
——————————————
“If you follow me, I may lead you straight to hell, but if you
trust me, I will lead you back out again.”
–Francesco Pfauth
——————————————
“We ran out of new ideas somewhere around 1978, since then we’ve
been repeating ourselves. Same songs, same movies, same clothes,
even the same crimes. Like this Robie guy, no imagination. He’s
just part of the rhythm and the rhyme of all this repeating.
This is 1996, here comes the millennium. But people are nervous,
they’re on edge, they’re jumpy. This is supposed to be something
new. But we can’t look that in the face, can we? So what do we
do? We grab a little something from one year in the fifties and
a little of something else from some other year, maybe late
sixties. We think we’re creating something new and different,
but really, all we’re doing is just repeating the same old…
nothing. We’re all copycats.”
–from Homicide: Life on the Street
——————————————
“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent
people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of
honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to
appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world
a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a
redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed
easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
——————————————
“No one beneath you can offend you. No one your equal would.”
–Jan L. Wells
——————————————
“The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with
annoying bastards.”
–Alexander Jablokov
——————————————
“We’re here for a good time, not a long time
So have a good time, the sun can’t rise everyday.”
–Trooper
——————————————
“Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.”
–George Santayana
——————————————
“Ignorance is not bliss — it is oblivion.”
–Philip Wylie
——————————————
“An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.”
–Victor Hugo
——————————————
“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and
your belief will help you create the fact.”
–William James
——————————————
“Maybe it was mean, but I really don’t think so.
You asked for the truth and I told you.”
–Sinead O’Connor
——————————————
“What a wonderful day we’ve had. You have learned something and,
I have learned something. Too bad we didn’t learn it sooner. We
could have gone to the movies instead.”
–from Perfect Strangers
——————————————
“Minds are for people who think.”
–Madman Murdoch
——————————————
“Since a rational man’s ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit
and achievement of values is a lifelong process — and the higher
the values, the harder the struggle — he needs a moment, an hour
or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of
his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his
values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of
rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther.” (Anthem)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Many words have been granted me, and some are wise and some are
false, but only three are holy: ‘I will it!'” (Anthem)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the
universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I
know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible
to me on earth. And my happiness is not the means to any end.
It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.”
(Anthem)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish.
I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their
needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a
sacrifice on their altars.” (Anthem)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“I think one thing we went through was common to a lot of people:
You work your whole life to achieve something, then you achieve
it and find out that you still have good days and bad days. So
you start thinking, ‘Is that all there is?’ After a while you
calm down and get back to work.”
–Elliot Easton
——————————————
“If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he
isn’t fit to live.”
–Martin Luther King, Jr.
——————————————
“Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who
have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have
not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the
future and live two lives?”
–Alan Lightman
——————————————
“Most people have learned to live in the moment. The argument
goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there
is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little
effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for
their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be
judged on its own. … It is a world of impulse. It is a world
of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks
just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.”
–Alan Lightman
——————————————
“Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible
decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be
responsible for his actions? Others hold that each decision must
be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is
chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds,
so long as they know the reason for each.”
–Alan Lightman
——————————————
“The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in
injustice and tragedy.”
–Richard Bach
——————————————
“The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of
respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one
family grow up under the same roof.”
–Richard Bach
——————————————
“We believed — and I personally still believe — that the so
called Voice of God narration, ubiquitous in documentaries
destined for PBS, is insulting to the audience. If you believe
in the intelligence of your audience, you don’t need to tell them
what to think and how to process the material they’re seeing.”
–Jayne Loader
——————————————
“I was accused of every monstrous vice by public rumour and
private rancour; my name, which had been a knightly or noble one,
was tainted. I felt that, if what was whispered, and muttered,
and murmured, was true, I was unfit for England; if false,
England was unfit for me.”
–Lord Byron
——————————————
“When indignation takes possession of his mind — and it is
easily excited — his disposition becomes malevolent. He hates
with the bitterest contempt. But as soon as he has indulged
those feelings, he regains the humanity which he had lost — from
the immediate impulse of provocation — and repents deeply. So
that his mind is continually making the most sudden transitions –
– from good to evil, from evil to good. A state of such
perpetual tumult must be attended with the misery of restless
inconsistency. He laments his want of tranquillity and speaks of
the power of application to composing studies, as a blessing
placed beyond his attainment, which he regrets.”
–Annabella Milbanke
——————————————
“You sit around watching all this stuff happen on TV… and the
TV sits and watches us do nothing! The TV must think we’re all
pretty lame.”
–Shannon Wheeler
——————————————
“I can never get people to understand that poetry is the
expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as
a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or and
eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such
a state?”
–Lord Byron
——————————————
“Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the
wildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of
science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex,
and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly
great poets… there is a reason assignable, not only for every
word, but for the position of every word.”
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge
——————————————
“[His mind] was like a volcano, full of fire and wealth,
sometimes calm, often dazzling and playful, but ever threatening.
It ran swift as the lightning from one subject to another, and
occasionally burst forth in passionate throes of intellect,
nearly allied to madness.”
–Lady Blessington
——————————————
“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape
those who dream only by night. In their grey visions they obtain
glimpses of eternity…”
–Edgar Allan Poe
——————————————
“I see at last that all the knowledge
I wrung from the darkness — that darkness flung me —
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing
The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.”
–Randall Jarrell
——————————————
“Is getting well ever an art, or art a way to get well?”
—-Robert Lowell
——————————————
“Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those
who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the
madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the
human situation.”
–Graham Greene
——————————————
“… You don’t like my ‘restless’ doctrines — I should be very
sorry if you did — but I can’t stagnate nevertheless — if I
must said let it be on the ocean no matter how stormy — anything
but a dull cruise on a level lake without ever losing sight of
the same insipid shores by which it is surrounded.”
–Lord Byron
——————————————
“I had hit a critical period in my life, where I changed very
much as a person. I consider the person I used to be, dead, and
I’m glad that he is. Insecure, frightened, confused, much like a
lot of people I know today.”
–Peter Steele
——————————————
“I always think the same thing when I read about someone
committing suicide. I think, ‘There, but for the grace of God,
go I.’ I think, ‘There’s only a twist of Fate between me and
them.’ I think, ‘It could have been me.’ I think, ‘I hope that
I can give someone else a reason to live through today so that he
or she will give me a reason to live through tomorrow.'”
–Dahven White
——————————————
“Opinion is a denial of truth. For if each man is entitled to
his own opinion then there can be nothing which is false,
consequently there can be nothing which is true.”
–Andrew Juric
——————————————
“Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret
weapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb. And every time a
crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in
the air — explode softly — and send thousands, millions, of
little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth — boxes
of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap, either — not little
boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built
right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and
lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile
and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world
with imagination.”
–Robert Fulghum
——————————————
“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize
it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our
eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny,
denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What
seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy,
and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a
golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.”
–Henry Miller
——————————————
“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life
when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for
himself.”
–Archibald MacLeish
——————————————
“It is remarkable how much mediocrity we live with, surrounding
ourselves with daily reminders that the average is acceptable.
Our world suffers from terminal normality. Take a moment to
assess all of the things around you that promote your being
‘average’. These are the things that keep you powerless to go
beyond a ‘limit’ you arbitrarily set for yourself. The first
step to having what your really want is the removal of everything
in your environment that represents mediocrity, removing those
things that are limiting. One way is to surround yourself with
friends who ask more of you than you do.”
–Stewart Emery
——————————————
“I am speaking to those among you who have retained some
sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped: ‘– to the
order of others’. If, in the chaos of the motives that have made
you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational
desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man
whom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one
owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who
are making an effort to know. Those who are making an effort to
fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine.” (Atlas 981)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by
my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the
injury or the favour others of , but earn it by my own
achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as
the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal
of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in
my values and no conflicts among my desires — so there are no
victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who
do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a
cannibal’s lust, men who neither make sacrifice nor accept them.”
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal
and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a
value if obtained by fraud — that an attempt to gain a value by
deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to
a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their
blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions,
while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness
become the enemies you have to dread and flee — that you do not
care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the
stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the
fools he succeeds in fooling — that honesty is not a social
duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most
profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to
sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded
consciousness of others.” (Atlas 937)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single
axiom: existence exists — and in a single choice: to live.
The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three
things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason —
Purpose — Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge —
Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must
proceed to achieve — Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty
that his mind is competent to think and his person is worth of
happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values
imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues
pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness:
rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice,
productiveness, pride.” (Atlas 936)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need
no morality on a desert island — it is on a desert island that
he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no
victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is
clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or
effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his
stock seed today — and reality will wipe him out, as he
deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought
and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.”
(Atlas 936)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at
any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own
severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade
the effort of the quest — but if devotion to the truth is the
hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more
heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the
responsibility of thinking.” (Atlas 935)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own
mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge
that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can
claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your
only judge of truth — and if others dissent from your verdict,
reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind
can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of
identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process
but his own judgement. Nothing can direct his judgement but his
moral integrity.” (Atlas 935)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of
irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in
any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature
requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless
fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless
he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is
to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and
live.” (Atlas 932)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those
who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed
that it belongs to your neighbours — between those who preached
that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven
and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the
sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your
life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.” (Atlas
930)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in
her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to
break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it
by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus
become the measure of hers, as if the vandal who smashed a statue
were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer
who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it
birth.”
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“It’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance
of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside,
not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar
across one’s view of existence. Don’t feel sorry for me. It was
gone right then.” (Atlas 883)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Yes… Yes, I feel that there’s no chance for me to exist, if
they do… no chance, no room, no world I can cope with… I
don’t want to feel it, I keep pushing it back, but it’s coming
closer and I know I have no place to run… I can’t explain what
it feels like, I can’t catch hold of it — and that’s path of the
terror, that you can’t catch hold of anything — it’s as if the
whole world were suddenly destroyed, but not by an explosion —
an explosion is something hard and solid — but destroyed by …
by some horrible kind of softening … as if nothing were solid,
nothing held any shape at all, and you could poke your finger
through stone walls and the stone would give, like jelly, and
mountains would slither, and buildings would switch their shapes
like clouds — and that would be the end of the world, not fire
and brimstone, but goo.” (Atlas 819)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Whenever anyone accuses some person of being ‘unfeeling,’ he
means that that person is just. He means that that person has no
causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does
not deserve. He means that ‘to feel’ is to go against reason,
against moral values, against reality.” (Atlas 818)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“My pride and my power of vision were all that I owned when I
started — and whatever I achieved, was achieved by means of
them. Both are greater now. Now I have the knowledge of the
superlative value I had missed: of my right to be proud of my
vision. The rest is mine to reach.” (Atlas 793)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Everything matters!”
–from S.F.W.
——————————————
“You’ll come back, because yours is an error of knowledge, not a
moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last
act of being victim to your own virtue. We’ll wait for you and
when you come back, you will have discovered that there need
never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash
of values as the one you’ve borne so well.” (Atlas 744)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“If you want to know the one reason that’s taking me back, I’ll
tell you: I cannot bring myself to abandon to destruction all
the greatness of the world, all that which was mine and yours,
which was made by us and is still ours by right — because I
cannot believe that men refuse to see, that they can remain blind
and deaf to us forever, when the truth is ours and their lives
depend on accepting it. … So long as men desire to live, I
cannot lose my battle.” (Atlas 744)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Don’t consider our interests or desires. You have no duty to
anyone but yourself.” (Atlas 740)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Don’t rely on our knowledge of what’s best for your future. We
do know, but it can’t be best until you know it.” (Atlas 740)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Consider the reasons which make us certain that we are right,
but not the fact that we are certain. If you are not convinced,
ignore our certainty. Don’t be tempted to substitute our
judgement for your own.” (Atlas 740)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“If any part of your uncertainty, is a conflict between your
heart and your mind — follow your mind.” (Atlas 740)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Did it ever occur to you, that there is no conflict of interests
among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most
personal desires — if they omit the irrational from their view
of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical?
There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a
threat to the aims of another — if men understand that reality
is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the
unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that
the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that
which isn’t.” (Atlas 736)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power
to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he
abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the
grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his
sphere of existence — by his own choice.” (Atlas 729)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“I want you to observe, that those who cry the loudest about
their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility
of reason, the impotence of logic — are those who have achieved
the full, exact, logical result of the ideas they preached, so
mercilessly logical that they dare not identify it. In a world
that proclaims the non-existence of the mind, the moral
righteousness of rule by brute force, the penalizing of the
competent in favour of the incompetent, the sacrifice of the best
to the worst — in such a world, the best have to turn against
society and have to become it’s deadliest enemies.” (Atlas 729)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“What I want you to understand, is the full evil of those who
claim to have become convinced that this earth, by its nature, is
a realm of malevolence where the good has no chance to win. Let
them check their premises. Let them check their standards of
value. Let them check — before they grant themselves the
unspeakable license of evil-as-necessity — whether they know
what is the good and what are the conditions it requires.”
(Atlas 729)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“I sat there beside him till morning — and as I watched his face
in the starlight, then the first ray of the sun on his untroubled
forehead and closed eyelids, what I experienced was not a prayer,
I do not pray, but that state of spirit at which a prayer is a
misguided attempt: a full, confident, affirming self-dedication
to my love of the right, to the certainty that the right would
win and that this boy would have the kind of future he deserved.
… I did not expect it to be as great as this — or as hard.”
(Atlas 727)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“She can live through it, because we do not hold the belief that
this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to
destruction. We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate
and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not
expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it — and
when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not
happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not
success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in
human life.” (Atlas 700)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Why should this seem so startling? There is only one kind of
men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other
kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have
presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable —
except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders,
have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but
have never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has
come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what
happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the
men of the mind. This is the mind on strike.” (Atlas 681)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“God help us, ma’am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we’d
been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which
punished those who observed it — for observing it. The more you
tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you
cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a
tool left at the mercy of the next man’s dishonesty. The honest
ones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest lost, the
dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a
law of goodness?” (Atlas 613)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“A painting is never finished — it simply stops in interesting
places.”
–Paul Gardner
——————————————
“I wish I could take language
And fold it like cool, moist rags.
I would lay words on your forehead.
I would wrap words on your wrists.
‘There, there,’ my words would say —
Or something better.
I would ask them to murmur,
‘Hush’ and ‘Shh, shhh, it’s all right.’
I would ask them to hold you all night.
I wish I could take language
And daub and soothe and cool
Where fever blisters and burns,
Where fever turns yourself against you.
I wish I could take language
And heal the words that were the wounds
You have no names for.”
–Julia Cameron
——————————————
“Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing
and regrouping.”
–Julia Cameron
——————————————
“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight
of the shore for a very long time.”
–Andr� Gide
——————————————
“The clock is ticking and you’re hearing the beat. You stop by a
museum shop, sign your name on a scuba-diving sheet, and commit
yourself to Saturday mornings in the deep end. You’re either
losing your mind — or gaining your soul. Life is meant to be an
artist date. That’s why we were created.”
–Julia Cameron
——————————————
“I finally realized that it wasn’t Starfleet that I was trying to
get away from. I was trying to escape the pain I felt, after my
wife’s death. I thought I could take the uniform, wrap it around
the pain and toss them both away. But it doesn’t work like that.
Running may help for a little while, but sooner or later the pain
catches up with you, and the only way to get rid of it is to
stand your ground.”
–from Deep Space Nine
——————————————
“It is said that [Robin Hood] fought against the looting rulers
and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is
not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is
remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of
need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the
poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of
virtue by practising charity with wealth which he did not own, by
giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay
for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol
of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights,
that we don’t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does
not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a
justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own
living, had demanded the power to dispose of the property of his
betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his
inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors.” (Atlas 534)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries
of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men
the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his
fire — until the day when men withdraw their vultures.” (Atlas
480)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“[He] stood motionless, not turning to the crowd, barely hearing
the applause. He stood looking at the judges. There was no
triumph in his face, no elation, only the still intensity of
contemplating a vision with a bitter wonder that was almost fear.
He was seeing the enormity of the smallness of the enemy who was
destroying the devastation, past the ruins of great factories,
the wrecks of powerful engines, the bodies of invincible men, he
had come upon the despoiler, expecting to find a giant — and had
found a rat eager to scurry for cover at the first sound of a
human step. If this is what has beaten us, he thought, the guilt
is ours.” (Atlas 449)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“I could say to you that I have done more good for my fellow man
than you can ever hope to accomplish — but I will not say it,
because I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my
right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a
justification for their seizure of my property or their
destruction of my life. I will not say that the good of others
was the purpose of my work — my own good was my purpose, and I
despise the man who surrenders his. I could say to you that you
do not serve the public good — that nobody’s good can be
achieved at the price of human sacrifices — that when you
violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of
all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to
destruction. I could say that you that you will and can achieve
nothing but universal devastation — as any looter must, when he
runs out of victims. I could say it, but I won’t. It is not
your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise.”
(Atlas 447)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“I am rich and proud of every penny I own. I made my money by my
own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of
every man I dealt with — the voluntary consent of those who
employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who
work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my
product. I shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask
me openly. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services
are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for
less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I
wish to sell it at a loss or give it away? I do not. If this is
evil, do whatever you please about me, according to whatever
standards you hold. These are mine. I am earning my own living,
as every honest man must. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact
of my own existence and the fact that I must work in order to
support it. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able
to do it and do it well. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact
that I am able to do it better than most people — the fact that
my work is of greater value than the work of my neighbours and
that more men are willing to pay me. I refuse to apologize for
my ability — I refuse to apologize for my success — I refuse to
apologize for my money.” (Atlas 446-7)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Did you ask me to name man’s motive power? Man’s motive power
is his moral code. Ask yourself where their code is leading you
and what it offers you as your final goal. A viler evil than to
murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A
viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to
demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the
furnace, besides. By their own statement, it is they who need
you and have nothing to offer you in return. By their own
statement, you must support them because they cannot survive
without you. Consider the obscenity of offering their impotence
and their need — their need of you — as a justification for
your torture. Are you willing to accept it? Do you care to
purchase — at the price of your great endurance, at the price of
you agony — the satisfaction of the needs of your own
destroyers?” (Atlas 423-4)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“All your life, you have heard yourself denounced; not for your
faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not
for your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been
scorned for all those qualities of character which are your
highest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of
acting on your own judgement and bearing sole responsibility for
your own life. You have been called arrogant for your
independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding
integrity. You have been called anti-social for the vision that
made you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been called
ruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to
your purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence
of your power to create wealth. You, who’ve expended an
inconceivable flow of energy, have been called a parasite. You,
who’ve created abundance where there had been nothing but
wastelands and helpless, starving men before you, have been
called a robber. You, who’ve kept them all alive, have been
called an exploiter. You, the purest and most moral man among
them, have been sneered at as a ‘vulgar materialist.’ Have you
stopped to ask them: by what right? — by what code? — by what
standard?” (Atlas 422-3)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Did you really think that we wanted those laws to be observed?
… We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s
not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against — then you’ll know
that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We’re after
power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the
real trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to
rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the
power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough
criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a
crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking
laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there
in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can
neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted —
and you create a nation of law-breakers — and then you case in
on guilt. Now that’s the system, that’s the game, and once you
understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.” (Atlas 406)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“That woman and all those like her keep evading the thoughts
which they know to be good. You keep pushing out of your mind
the thoughts which you believe to be evil. They do it, because
they want to avoid effort. You do it, because you won’t permit
yourself to consider anything that would spare you. They indulge
their emotions at any cost. You sacrifice your emotions as the
first cost of any problem. They are willing to bear nothing.
You are willing to bear anything. They keep evading
responsibility. You keep assuming it. But don’t you see that
the essential error is the same? Any refusal to recognize
reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences.
There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.
Don’t ignore your own desires. Don’t sacrifice them. Examine
their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to
bear.” (Atlas 389)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all
evil? To love a thing is to know its nature. To love money is
to known and love the fact that money is the creation of the best
power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the
effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his
soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of
money — and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money
are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve
it.” (Atlas 384)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon
the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon
your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own
existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to
men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the
hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering
your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers your
scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a
penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become,
not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a
reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil,
because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil,
because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the
root of your hatred of money?” (Atlas 384)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth —
the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he
started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if
not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money
corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not
envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have
done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been
distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites
instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was
the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root.
Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the
reason why you call it evil?” (Atlas 384)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of
the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of
guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to
think. Then is money made by the mad who invents a motor at the
expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the
intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the
expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of
the lazy? Money is made — before it can be looted or mooched —
made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his
ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume
more than he has produced.” (Atlas 383)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“I think it’s funny. There was a time when men were afraid that
somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to
their fellows. Nowadays, they’re afraid that somebody will name
what everybody knows. Have you practical people ever though that
that’s all it would take to blast your whole, big, complex
structure, with all your laws and guns — just somebody naming
the exact nature of what you’re doing?” (Atlas 379)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“No longer conscious of my movement, I discovered a new unity
with nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a
source I never dreamt existed.”
–Roger Bannister
——————————————
“What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is
not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has
already been said is still not enough.”
–Eug穫e Delacroix
——————————————
“It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything
but the best, you very often get it.”
–W. Somerset Maugham
——————————————
“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is
enlightened.”
–Lao-tzu
——————————————
“Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter
do good things.”
–Edgar Degas
——————————————
“The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who
want something else more than truth.”
–Adrienne Rich
——————————————
“Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when
we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.”
–Meister Eckhart
——————————————
“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
–Jalal ud-Din Rumi
——————————————
“When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit our lives
are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives
that determines the kind of men we are.”
–Cesar Chavez
——————————————
“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
–Albert Einstein
——————————————
“Who was it that said he needed a fulcrum? Give me an
unobstructed right-of-way and I’ll show them how to move the
earth!” (Atlas 234)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“The men of the press, who despised their own profession, did not
know why they were enjoying it today. One of them, a young man
with years of notorious success behind him and a cynical look of
twice his age, said suddenly, ‘I know what I’d like to be: I
wish I could be a man who covers news!'” (Atlas 223)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“She looked at the crowd and she felt, simultaneously,
astonishment that they should stare at her, when this event was
so personally her own that no communication about it was
possible, and a sense of fitness that they should be here, that
they should want to see it, because the sight of an achievement
was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.”
(Atlas 222)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“… there’s nothing of any importance in life — except how well
you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are,
will come from that. It’s the only measure of human value. All
the codes of ethics they’ll try to ram down your throat are just
so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of
their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of
morality that’s on a gold standard.” (Atlas 98)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“[What for] was the first question he asked about any activity
proposed to him — and nothing would make him act, if he found no
valid answer. He flew through the days of his summer month like
a rocket, but if one stopped him in midflight, he could always
name the purpose of his every random moment. Two things were
impossible to him: to stand still or to move aimlessly.” (Atlas
92-3)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“Francisco could do anything he undertook, he could do it better
than anyone else, and he did it without effort. There was no
boasting in his manner and consciousness, no thought of
comparison. His attitude was not: ‘I can do it better than
you,’ but simply: ‘I can do it.’ What he meant by doing was
doing superlatively.” (Atlas 92)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“If that’s the price of getting together, then I’ll be damned if
I want to live on the same earth with any human beings! If the
rest of them can survive only be destroying us, then why should
we wish them to survive? Nothing can make self-immolation
proper. Nothing can give them the right to turn men into
sacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the
best. One can’t be punished for being good. One can’t be
penalized for ability. If that is right, then we’d better start
slaughtering one another, because there isn’t any right at all in
the world!” (Atlas 79)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“It was his Fourth Concerto, the last work he had written. The
crash of its opening chords swept the sights of the streets away
from her mind. The Concerto was a great cry of rebellion. It
was a ‘NO’ flung at some vast process of torture, a denial of
suffering, a denial that held the agony of the struggle to break
free. The sounds were like a voice saying: There is no
necessity for pain — why, then, is the worst pain reserved for
those who will not accept its necessity? — we who hold the love
and the secret of joy, to what punishment have we been sentenced
for it, and by whom? … The sounds of torture became defiance,
the statement of agony became a hymn to a distant vision for
whose sake anything was worth enduring, even this. It was the
song of rebellion — and of a desperate quest.” (Atlas 69)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“I don’t know. But I’ve watched them here for twenty years and
I’ve seen the change. They used to rush through here, and it was
wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they
were going and were eager to get there. Now they’re hurrying
because they are afraid. It’s not a purpose that drives them,
it’s fear. They’re not going anywhere, they’re escaping. And I
don’t think they know what it is that they want to escape. They
don’t look at one another. They jerk when brushed against. They
smile too much, but it’s an ugly kind of smiling: it’s not joy,
it’s pleading. I don’t know what it is that’s happening to the
world.” (Atlas 64)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth
matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she
would have found honour in challenging; it was ineptitude — a
grey spread of cotton that seemed soft and shapeless, that could
offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a
barrier in her way. She stood, disarmed, before the riddle of
what made this possible, she could find no answer.” (Atlas 55-6)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“What did they seek from him? What were they after? He had
never asked anything of them; it was they who wished to hold him,
they who pressed a claim on him — and the seemed to have the
form of affection, but it was a form which he found harder to
endure than any sort of hatred. He despised causeless affection,
just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him
for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which
he could wish to be loved. He wondered what response they could
hope to obtain from him in such manner — if his response was
what they wanted. And it was, he though; else why those constant
complaints, those unceasing accusations about his indifference?
Why that chronic air of suspicion, as if they were waiting to be
hurt? He had never had a desire to hurt them, but he had always
felt their defensive, reproachful expectation; they seemed
wounded by anything he said, it was not a matter of his words or
actions, it was almost… almost as if they were wounded by the
mere fact of his being. Don’t start imagining the insane — he
told himself severely, struggling to face the riddle with the
strictest of his ruthless sense of justice. He could not condemn
them without understanding; and he could not understand.” (Atlas
42-3)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“You’re not sorry. You could’ve been here if you made the
effort. But when did you ever make an effort for anybody but
yourself? You’re not interested in any of us or in anything we
do. You think if you pay the bills, that’s enough, don’t you?
Money! That’s all you know. And all you give us is money. Have
you even given us any time?” (Atlas Shrugged 40)
–Ayn Rand
——————————————
“No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are
made. Destiny is made known silently.”
–Agnes de Mille
——————————————
“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is
boundless.”
–Jean-Jacques Rousseau
——————————————
“To the rationally minded the mental processes of the intuitive
appear to work backwards.”
–Frances Wickes
——————————————
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear
most.”
–Fyodor Dostoyevski
——————————————
“I’ve noticed that a lot of people consider ‘finding yourself’ to
be a really frivolous and unproductive study. I’m not sure why.
Everything important in life really seems to get down-played so
children can be encouraged to join the rat race and make as much
money as possible, instead of being told that they should be
happy first.”
–Sanjay Singh
——————————————
“The problem with keeping up with the Jones’ is that it creates a
world full of Jones’.”
–Julian Barton
——————————————
“… whether your name is Gehrig, or Ripken, DiMaggio, or
Robinson, or that of some youngster who picks up his bat or puts
on his glove, you are challenged by the game of baseball to do
your very best, day in and day out, and that’s all I’ve ever
tried to do.”
–Cal Ripken Jr.
——————————————
“Trust in yourself. Your perceptions are often far more accurate
than you are willing to believe.”
–Claudia Black
——————————————
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the
stars.”
–Les Brown
——————————————
“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or
how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The
artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we
take leap after leap in the dark.”
–Agnes de Mille
——————————————
“I feel drunk but I’m sober
I’m young and I’m underpaid
I’m tired but I’m working, yeah.
I care but I’m restless
I’m here but I’m really gone
I’m wrong and I’m sorry, baby.
What it all comes down to
Is that everything’s gonna be quite alright.”
–Alanis Morissette
——————————————
“So let me get this straight. You want to fly on a magic carpet
to see the King of the Potato People and plead with him for your
freedom, and you’re telling me you’re completely sane?”
–from Red Dwarf
——————————————
“Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of
the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do
will ever be good enough — that we should try harder.”
–Julia Cameron
——————————————
“When an actor is in the moment, he or she is engaged in
listening for the next right thing creatively. When a painter is
painting, he or she may begin with a plan, but that plan is soon
surrendered to the painting’s own plan. This is often expressed
as ‘The brush takes the next stroke.’ In dance, in composition,
in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the
conduit than the creator of what we express.”
–Julia Cameron
——————————————
“Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is
necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is
destructive. In the middle category, however — that of the
unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury,
exuberance, etc.”
–Ursula K. LeGuin
——————————————
“They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not
barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society,
but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without
monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock
exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb.
Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet
shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less
complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit,
encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness
as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil
interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to
admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If
you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to
praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to
lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold, we can
no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.
How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not
naive and happy children — though their children were, in fact
happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose
lives were not wretched.”
–Ursula K. LeGuin
——————————————
“Il a mis le caf�
Dans la tasse
Il a mis le lait
Dans la tasse de caf�
Il a mis le sucre
Dans le caf� au lait
Avec la petite cuiller
Il a tourn�
Il a bu le caf� au lait
Et il a repos� la tasse
Sans me parler.”
[He put the coffee in the cup. He put the milk in the cup of
coffee. He put the sugar in the white coffee, with the tea-
spoon, he stirred. He drank the white coffee and he put the cup
down. Without speaking to me.]
–Jacques PrＷert
——————————————
“Leap, and the net will appear.”
–Julia Cameron
——————————————
“Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes
you happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on
economic well-being than any other single factor.”
–Paul Hawken
——————————————
“Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to
have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they
want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is
the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what
you need to do, in order to have what you want.”
–Margaret Young
——————————————
“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it
is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”
–Seneca
——————————————
“Eliminate something superfluous from your life. Break a habit.
Do something that makes you feel insecure.”
–Piero Ferrucci
——————————————
“Each painting has its own way of evolving… When the painting
is finished, the subject reveals itself.”
–William Baziotes
——————————————
“Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible
thing: no one to blame.”
–Erica Jong
——————————————
“I have made my world and it is a much better world than I ever
saw outside.”
–Louise Nevelson
——————————————
“We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we
stop trying to conform to our own or to other people’s models,
learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.”
–Shakti Gawain
——————————————
“A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.”
–Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
——————————————
“The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf.”
–Shakti Gawain
——————————————
“Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know
that everything in this life has a purpose.”
–Elisabeth K｜ler-Ross
——————————————
“All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel
heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the
bones are moving easily under the flesh.”
–Doris Lessing
——————————————
“Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and
whispers, ‘grow, grow.'”
–The Talmud
——————————————
“I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I
think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I
were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming
rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they
happen to strike me.”
–E. B. White
——————————————
“I was always matching wits with authority. Pondering over my
past and present hassles, I began to wonder why my life had taken
the direction it had. What cosmic forces had led me to this
precise moment that saw me, once again, dancing on the rim of the
volcano? The answers started to come to me as my life flashed
before my eyes. I think it all started when I was arrested as a
pyromaniac.”
–Bill Lee
——————————————
“It’s no wonder that our priorities got screwed up. Just because
a person can throw a ball harder or hit it further than most
ordinary human beings, he is placed on a pedestal at an early
age. I don’t think there is anything wrong with admiring an
exceptionally skilled person, but the hero-worship we shower on
athletes goes beyond that. This is a part of the tribal
influence handed down by our ancestors. Man has always been
lionized for his physical prowess. An Indian brave did not have
to pass a math quiz in order to become a chief, he just had to
tear the ass of some bear. And the twelve labours of Hercules
did not include a Regents’ exam. Society has tended to find its
heroes in the most obvious arenas, and I don’t regard that as a
healthy thing. We should find our heroes in the bathroom mirror
each and every morning.”
–Bill Lee
——————————————
“Alcohol is like anything else. It’s only as bad as the person
it’s being poured into. If it’s used to heighten an occasion, or
to take an edge off stress, I don’t see a problem. Trouble
starts when you either lose control and let the bottle run you,
or when you believe its promises of immortality. You realize
that no matter how much you punish yourself, you always seem to
wake up the next day. Pretty soon you’re convinced that you will
never die. What that happens I guess it is time to look for help
before you life becomes one long, lost weekend.
–Bill Lee
——————————————
“During those moments on the pitching rubber, when you have every
pitch at your command working to its highest potential, you are
your own universe. For hours after the game, this sense of
completeness lingers. Then you sink back to what we humorously
refer to as reality. Your body aches and your muscles cry out.
You feel your mortality. That can be a difficult thing to
handle. I believe pitchers come in touch with death a lot sooner
than other players. We are more aware of the subtle changes
taking place in our body and are unable to overlook the tell-tale
hints that we are not going to last on this planet forever.
Every pitcher has to be a little bit in love with death. There’s
a subconscious fatalism there.”
–Bill Lee
——————————————
“I stopped watching the game and sat back to watch the fans. It
was like watching a Fassbinder film, depicting mankind at its
most berserk. The experience made me wonder if we’re not
breeding a society that lacks self-esteem. I don’t think we pat
people on the back enough, letting them know that being able to
fix a sink is just as much skill as being able to get Rod Carew
out with the bases loaded. And more worthwhile, if you were to
ask me. People must be made to feel their value. Otherwise,
when they discover they can’t find any thrills in religion or in
cults, they head out to the ballpark, seeking a vicarious sense
of fulfilment. They’re tired of long-term reality; they don’t
recognize what it has to offer them. All they want is one good
fantasy. Realizing that really shook me up.”
–Bill Lee
——————————————
“I don’t get upset over things I can control, because if I can
control them there’s no sense in getting upset. And I don’t get
upset over things I can’t control, because if I can’t control
them there’s no sense in getting upset.”
–Mickey Rivers
——————————————
“There’s a saying that no man is an island, which I completely
disagree with. I believe that a man should be self-sufficient.
What I propose is almost socialistic, almost communistic: Each
person should have his own plot of land and grow their food.
They should each have a civil service job and contribute equally.
If you don’t contribute then you don’t eat and you die. Don’t be
a burden on those people that are breaking their backs to work.”
–Peter Steele
——————————————
“Whether left or right, when views get that extreme then they
become warped and open to the sickness of the person holding
them.”
–Peter Steele
——————————————
“I know what you’re going to say! ‘They are men, and men should
be free.’ A free man is dangerous to himself and everyone else.
Freedom should be left to those who can put it to good use…”
–Dave Sim
——————————————
“You just gotta keep going on. Get up, and do your job. Go to
work, get through each day, one day at a time, like that. And
you hope that one day, you’ll get up and it’ll hurt a little
less. You just gotta just get through it. You just go on. It’s
that simple.”
–from Homicide: Life on the Street
——————————————
“All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won’t
have to be afraid all the time. Only one thing stops me. A
promise I made…”
–from The Shawshank Redemption
——————————————
“What do you really want to know? Am I sorry for what I did?
There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m
in here, but because you think I should be. I look back on the
way I was. A young, stupid kid that committed that terrible
crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense
to him. Tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s
long gone, and this old man is all that’s left.”
–from The Shawshank Redemption
——————————————
“I’ve had some long nights in the stir. Alone in the dark, with
nothing but your thoughts, time can draw out like a blade. That
was the longest night of my life.”
–from The Shawshank Redemption
——————————————
“It floats around, it’s got to land on somebody. It was my turn,
that’s all. I was in the path of the tornado. I didn’t expect
the storm would last as long as it has.”
–from The Shawshank Redemption
——————————————
“Gone is the blinding glow in his hands — gone, too, is the
illusion of purity and beauty! In it’s place all that remains is
mind-numbing, spine-chilling reality!”
–Dave Sim
——————————————
“When I start the book, I’m The Writer. The writer bitches for a
week about how he never has any fun, he’s tired of being funny
all the time, and nobody cares about him anyhow. This is
followed by a period of deep intense silence, much staring at
walls, punctuated by cheery optimism on the order of: ‘That’s
it! I’m Dead! I can’t think of an ending!’ or ‘I’m just going
to have to scrap the first ten pages — they’re lousy.’ Often it
is less coherent than that — reduced to the more succinct,
‘Garbage! It’s all GARBAGE!'”
–Dave Sim
——————————————
“Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once
in a while, you could miss it.”
–from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
——————————————
“I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the
death, your right to say it.”
–Voltaire
——————————————
“All the world’s a stage, and the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his
time plays many parts.”
–William Shakespeare
——————————————
“Forgive you enemies, but never forget their names.”
–John F. Kennedy
——————————————
“Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.”
——————————————
“The truth is an anagram of an anagram.”
–Umberto Eco
——————————————
“Floating, falling, sweet intoxication
Touch me, trust me, savour each sensation.
Let the dream begin, let you darker side give in.”
–from The Phantom of the Opera
——————————————
“It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a
warning to others.”
——————————————
“You know, I got a daughter, she lives in Michigan. When she was
six years old we took her to the circus, one minute she’s
laughing at the clowns, you know, getting out of the Volkswagon.
The next minute she’s telling me that her stomach hurts. Soon
she’s crying, then she’s screaming. We drove her right to the
emergency room, and she’s got a fever, it’s too high. The
doctors poke and prod, and still they can’t find anything wrong.
Now her vital signs weaken, and they put her on an IV and they
still can’t find anything wrong. Not anything. One day I walked
into her room, and the nurse was trying to put in a new IV and
she couldn’t find the spot. Her little veins were weak, and
[she] starts getting afraid of the needle, and she looked up at
me and said ‘Daddy, make it better.’ I can’t you how I felt,
when she looked up at me and said that, I couldn’t make it
better. There was nothing I could do. She was my daughter and I
was so powerless. I felt so powerless.”
–from Homicide: Life on the Street
——————————————
“Have you ever noticed, detective, that there are people in this
world who can tell stories, but they’re not the ones that write
them? People don’t grow wealthy or powerful through virtue or
intelligence or hard work, though those things do figure in.
They grow wealthy and powerful because they know how to take
what’s in front of them and shape it, and use it.”
–from Under Suspicion
——————————————
“Writing will be your companion through the darkest and brightest
days of your life — if that is what you want. It exposes pain
and guilt and the greatest joy. It is your own assessment of who
you are. You should write as much as you can and as much as you
want to. It will be something to turn to.”
–Sharda Tarachandra
——————————————
“You can never run away from a weakness. You must sometime fight
it or perish, and if that be so, why not now, and where you
stand?”
–Robert Louis Stevenson
——————————————
“At first he thought he felt bad because he was afraid of leading
an army, but it wasn’t true. He knew he’d make a good commander.
He felt himself wanting to cry. He hadn’t cried since the first
few days of homesickness after he got here. He tried to put a
name on the feeling that put a lump in his throat and made him
sob silently, however much he tried to hold it down. He bit down
on his hand to stop the feeling, to replace it with pain. It
didn’t help.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“Ender stepped under the water and rinsed himself, took the sweat
of combat and let it run down the drain. All gone, except they
recycled it and we’ll be drinking Bonzo’s blood water in the
morning. All the life gone out of it, but his blood just the
same, his blood and my sweat, washed down in their stupidity or
cruelty or whatever it was that made them let it happen.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“There was no doubt now in Ender’s mind. There was no help for
him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no one would save him
from it. Peter might be scum, but he had been right, always
right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters,
the power to kill and destroy, because if you can’t kill then you
are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will
ever save you.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“Whether he likes it or not, [he] cannot remain incognito
forever. He has outraged too many wise men and pleased too many
fools to hide behind his too-appropriate order to assume
leadership of the forces of stupidity he has marshalled, or his
enemies will unmask him in order to better understand the disease
that has produced such a warped and twisted mind.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“Well, I’m your man. I’m the bloody bastard you wanted when you
had me spawned. I’m your tool, and what difference does it make
if I hate the part of me that you most need? What difference
does it make that when the little serpents killed me in the game,
I agreed with them, and was glad.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“I’ll put it bluntly. Human beings are free except when humanity
needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe
humanity needs me — to find out what you’re good for. We might
both do despicable things, but if humankind survives, then we
were good tools.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“This is the essence of the transaction between storyteller and
audience. The ‘true’ story is not the one that exists in my
mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper
that you hold in your hands. The story in my mind is nothing but
a hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to
try to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true
story, is the one that the audience members create in their
minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed,
elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own
experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“… All these readers have placed themselves inside this story,
not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the
world, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“[It] was written and sold. I knew it was a strong story because
I cared about it and believed in it. I had no idea that it would
have the effect it had on the audience. While most people
ignored it, of course, and continue to live full and happy lives
without reading it or anything else by me, there was still a
surprisingly large group who responded to the story with some
fervency.”
–Orson Scott Card
——————————————
“I don’t pray anymore. I used to, I used to pray for answers. A
clue, a sign of what I should do. How to find something precious
in this life. There was a time when I thought it was my work, my
job, but is it? Nothing in this world changes because of what I
do. The hurt goes on and on. God has given up on us. He
doesn’t hear us anymore…”
–from Homicide: Life on the Street
——————————————
“Singers attract fans with aspects to their own personality.
People feel I’m passionate and obsessive. They know this isn’t a
profession for me, it’s a vocation. It’s not an egotistical
thing, but something else. I’m in a dialogue with my audience,
and that’s something I need.”
–Morrissey
——————————————
“Passivity is the culprit. Think of yourself as the victim, you
become the victim.”
–from Law & Order
——————————————
“When I was very young, I went to a grade school in New York City
called Saint Bart’s for Boys. We used to call it the fortress,
that’s because the outside of the building looked like a medieval
fort. But in fact, it was an oasis, right in the middle of my
neighbourhood. The brothers and sisters were very strict, you
know, my butt caught the bamboo more than a few times. But I
didn’t hate it. I didn’t hate it. Those rules made me feel
important, they made me feel worth protecting. I felt safe. And
then I went to a Jesuit high school, Saint Ignatius. The Jesuits
taught me how to think, I haven’t felt safe since.”
–from Homicide: Life on the Street
——————————————
“I don’t want to hope anymore, I almost died from this in the
first place, and I don’t want to get that down again.”
–Lisa Neve
——————————————
“And we laughed, at the world.
They can have their diamonds,
And we’ll have our pearls.”
–Jill Sobule
——————————————
“In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.”
–from Terminator 2
——————————————
“It was a truly discomforting state. The world seemed distant,
as though he were looking at it through smoky glass. Sounds were
eerily muted, even those of the traffic outside and a cat in the
alley under his window. His sense of touch was obscured as well,
as if he were wearing oven mitts. He had difficulty remembering
anything clearly. It was a little bit like being really, really
drunk, with the room spinning around and a feeling like had
stepped away from the world. Except that the dimness made it
feel as if the world were trying to pull away from him.
Everything but death and loss seemed uncertain. Death and loss
were the only constants in his life.”
–Don Bassingthwaite
——————————————
“There was too much noise. Sirens from police cars and
ambulances. Shouts from the crowd on the street eighteen floors
below. Traffic from other streets and all of the noises of San
Francisco. Mostly, though, there were the voices. Whispering to
him. Reminding him of the dark things he had done — all of the
little things he had forgotten, all of the big things he had
tried to forget. Mostly they reminded him of his biggest secret,
a betrayal of trust and friendship long ago. He squeezed his
eyes shut as if that could somehow keep the voices away.”
–Don Bassingthwaite
——————————————
“For the past weeks I’d been reacting. That was no way to win.
To win, you take the initiative. You instigate the action. You
make the opponent react to you.”
–Richard Marcinko
——————————————
“When you fight, you don’t fight for abstract values like the
flag, or the nation, or democracy. You fight for your buddy.
You fight to keep him alive, and he fights to keep you alive, and
you go on that way, day after day, battle after battle. And when
one of your buddies dies, something inside you dies as well. But
you go on. You fight, so that his death isn’t meaningless, his
sacrifice isn’t for nothing.”
–Richard Marcinko
——————————————
“Your politics are your’s. You’ve never thrown in. The minute
you do that, their doctrines become your’s. You can be held
responsible.”
–from The X-Files
——————————————
“I just want to be happy, and I’m so afraid that I never will
be.”
–from E.R.
——————————————
“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be
changed until it is faced.”
–James Baldwin
——————————————
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change
the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
–Margaret Mead
——————————————
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
–Mohandas Gandhi
——————————————
“Science is a body of truths which offers clear and certain
knowledge about the real world and is therefore superior to
tradition, philosophy, religion, dogma, and superstition which
offer shadowy knowledge about an ideal world.”
–Donald DeMarco
——————————————
“You ruined my life. I lost my wife, my kid, my work. I lost
everything all because of a little bad luck. You gotta pay for
that man, you gotta pay. Otherwise there’s no justice in this
world, otherwise it’s all meaningless. You can’t just do
something, and then pretend you didn’t, that it didn’t happen,
that somehow you weren’t involved. You were, you did. It’s your
fault. And now you gotta die for it.”
–from Homicide: Life on the Street
——————————————
“He had regrets, of course, but not so many that he would lose
any sleep over them. Life surprised him now and then and he
didn’t much care for surprises, unless he was passing them out.
But — what was to be done? You had to deal with the reality, he
had learned that over the years, no matter how much you didn’t
like it.”
–Steve Perry
——————————————
“Did that myth at the heart of all the fairy tales her mother had
told her, that part about happily ever after, ever really work
out that way? How many children around the galaxy had been given
that pretty picture, had swallowed it entire, only to grow up and
find that reality was not so simple, not so beautiful, not so
easy? The story didn’t end when the brave princess killed the
wicked queen and rescued the prince. That, she was learning, was
the easy part. The hard part came when the guns were cleaned and
reholstered, the bodies of the villains cremated, and the day-to-
day business of life reared its ugly cobra’s head and grinned
down at you. When your prince had doubts you couldn’t answer for
him, when you had doubts he could only shrug at, that, that was
the hard part. That was the part the stories hadn’t addressed.”
–Steve Perry
——————————————
“You know what it is that makes a leader? Sacrifice. Sacrifice
yourself and men will follow you anywhere.”
–from Back in Action
——————————————
“You know, everyday I get out of bed and drag myself to the next
cup of coffee. I take a sip and the caffeine kicks in. I can
focus my eyes again. My brain starts to order the day. I’m up,
I’m alive. I’m ready to rock. But the time is coming when I
wake up and decide that I’m not getting out of bed. Not for
coffee, or food, or sex. If it comes to me, fine. If it won’t,
fine. No more expectations. The longer I live the less I know.
I should know more, I should know the coffee’s killing me.
You’re suspicious of your suspicions? I’m jealous. I’m so
jealous. You still have the heart to have doubts. Me? I’m
going to lock up a 14 year old kid for what could be the rest of
his natural life. I got to do this. This is my job. This is
the deal. This is the law. This is my day. I have no doubts or
suspicions about it. Heart has nothing to do with it anymore.
It’s all in the coffee.”
–from Homicide: Life on the Street
——————————————
“Why did you make it so hard for me? I’d rather empty the ocean
with a sieve. I do it for you. Or count the grains of sand on
every beach. All for you. There are so many people, so many
countries. But I have time. All the time in the world.
Eternity.”
–Grant Morrison
——————————————
“And when it’s all done, when there’s no one left you’ll come
back for me. And tell me who I am and why I have to do what I
do. And explain ‘Eternity.’ You’ll come back.”
–Grant Morrison
——————————————
“Why am I in Hell? It hurts. It hurts all the time. Why am I
in Hell? I just want to go home and lie on the bed the way I
used to. Please take me home.”
–Grant Morrison
——————————————
“Paintings may not have nearly the power to convert people that
the printed or spoken word has, but each man has his part to play
in the human and divine drama — some persons just a few lines,
others whole pages. To refuse to play one’s role at all is not
the answer. It is better to light one candle than to curse the
darkness.”
–William Kurelek
——————————————
“Days of my life I’d like to forget: The day the doctors told me
I was sick. The day I had to tell my friends I was ill. The day
my hair fell out. The first day after my surgery. They’re also
the days I’ll always remember.”
–Kate Sawford
——————————————
“Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not
created for pleasure: you were created for Joy. And if you do
not know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet
begun to live.”
–Thomas Merton
——————————————
“More than any other time in history, humanity faces a
crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness.
The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom
to choose correctly.”
–Woody Allen
——————————————
“Opera once was an important social instrument — especially in
Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera
together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the
same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness.
That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching
television.”
–Luciano Berio
——————————————
“People are brave enough to spit into an open wound, the problem
is that they’re so afraid, that they’ll only do it after the
beast is dead.”
–Sanjay Singh
——————————————
“Keep staring at the stars and someday they will collapse.”
–James J. Montgomery
——————————————
“Soaks my skin — through to the bone
Pain is nothing that a downpour won’t erase
Rain — you can’t hold on to it
A treasure you cannot frame
Rain — somehow I’m drawn to it
I feel engaged, one and the same
When heaven’s dressing beads off my face
The pain is nothing that a downpour won’t erase.”
–Delerium
——————————————
“I was born to fight your brand of order!”
–from The Adventures of Batman & Robin
——————————————
“You actually care about those creatures, you’re just as crazy as
they are.”
–from The Adventures of Batman & Robin
——————————————
“I’ve seen how you treat your prisoners. Forgotten and scared
without hope or compassion.”
–from The Adventures of Batman & Robin
——————————————
“The morning sun rises to greet him, and in its low, warm light
he stands like some sort of pagan god, or deposed tyrant, staring
out over the city he’s sworn to… stare out over. And it’s
evident, just by looking at him that he’s got some pretty heavy
things on his mind.”
–from The Tick
——————————————
“We cannot go ahead without leaving something behind.”
–Lemuel K. Washburn
——————————————
“It is harder to live when those we love are dead.”
–Lemuel K. Washburn
——————————————
“There is no sadder grief than that which lies at the bottom of a
life that has been wrecked through deception.”
–Lemuel K. Washburn
——————————————
“Have a good time, make life cheerful and bright, dance if you
want to, sing if you can, play as long as you live and leave the
world with a smile.”
–Lemuel K. Washburn
——————————————
“To correct in ourselves what we condemn in others would remove
most of the evils of life.”
–Lemuel K. Washburn
——————————————
“History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and
nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the
double enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of
tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment.”
–Lemuel K. Washburn
——————————————
“The statue of liberty that will endure on this continent is not
the one made of granite or bronze, but the one made of love of
freedom.”
–Lemuel K. Washburn
——————————————
“I saw you with your envoy
A consenting adult
Technique in moderation
But vogue to the cult
Me I’ve got my strangers
To exile in the night
I guess I’m just addicted
To the pain of delight.”
–Melissa Etheridge
——————————————
“Go on and close your eyes, go on imagine me there
She’s got similar features with longer hair
And if that’s what it takes to get you through
Go on and close your eyes it shouldn’t bother you.”
–Melissa Etheridge
——————————————
“I was about to tell him he was wrong to dwell on it, because it
really didn’t matter. But he cut me off and urged me one last
time, drawing himself up to his full height and asking me if I
believed in God. I said no. He sat down indignantly. He said
it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn
their backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to
doubt it, his life would become meaningless. ‘Do you want my life
to be meaningless?’ he shouted. As far as I could see, it didn’t
have anything to do with me, and I told him so. But from across
the table he had already thrust the crucifix in my face was
screaming irrationally, ‘I am a Christian. I ask Him to forgive
you for sins. How can you not believe that He suffered for you?’
I was struck by how sincere he seemed, but I had had enough. It
was getting hotter and hotter. As always, whenever I want to get
rid of someone I’m not really listening to, I made it appear as
if I agreed. To my surprise, he acted triumphant. ‘You see, you
see!’ he said. ‘You do believe, don’t you, and you’re going to
place your trust in Him, aren’t you?’ Obviously, I again said
no. He fell back in his chair”
–Albert Camus
——————————————
“It’s very hard to let someone in when you’ve caused so much
pain. To risk the emotion.”
–from Forever Knight
——————————————
“Just one more time to touch you
Just one more time to tell you
You’re on my mind
Baby, why can’t I have you
You’re breaking my heart in two
You know what I’m going through
Oh baby, why can’t I have you?”
–The Cars
——————————————
“Who’s gonna tell you when it’s too late
Who’s gonna tell you things aren’t so great
You can’t go on, thinking nothing’s wrong
Who’s gonna drive you home, tonight?

Who’s gonna pick you up when you fall
Who’s gonna hang it up when you call
Who’s gonna pay attention to your dreams
Who’s gonna plug their ears, when you scream?”
–The Cars
——————————————
“You see with your eyes. This means you can be misled by charm,
by outward appearance. By webs of glamour, by surface pretences.
I do not see with my eyes. I see good and I see evil. Nothing
else.”
–Neil Gaiman
——————————————
“I do not permit affection, or lack thereof, to influence my
actions. There is good, and there is evil. The good must be
protected; the evil eradicated. I have shown you the triumph of
evil, as a caution.”
–Neil Gaiman
——————————————
“You wish to see the distant realms? Very well. But know this
first, the places you will visit, the places you will see, do not
exist. For there are only two worlds — your world, which is the
real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this one,
worlds of the human imagination. Their reality, or lack of
reality is not important. What is important is that they are
there. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape.
Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power, provide refuge and
pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus
they are all that matters. Do you understand?”
–Neil Gaiman
——————————————
“There aren’t any good guys, and there aren’t any bad guys.
There’s just us. People. Doing our best to get by.”
–Neil Gaiman
——————————————
“People kill what they fear. They burned, and drowned, and
hanged those they saw as witches, the devil’s servants: the wise
women and the cunning men, the unfortunate, the lost and the
strange.”
–Neil Gaiman
——————————————
“The red flame flickers on the wall of the cave
(smeared with ochre, berry dye, charcoal)
Making the great elk move,
Making the mastodon breath,
Making the hunters race and kill.

Watch them seeking to placate and understand the world above
This they know.
This they understand.
There is darkness, everywhere, outside.

The dark is everywhere; and though the sun comes up,
And though the fires blossom and are tamed,
The darkness is there,
The darkness is waiting.

As the things in the darkness
That whisper before they feast,
They are to be placated and persuaded,
They are to be loved and sacrificed to,
They are to be prayed to and distrusted.

And so there is magic.”
–Neil Gaiman
——————————————
“Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstand all you see
It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out
It doesn’t matter much to me.”
–The Beatles
——————————————
“Pain. I started cuttings on myself when I was quite young. The
backs of my arms. I did it with a knife. I didn’t learn it from
anyone. It was the way I knew I was alive and human. At the time
I hadn’t developed enough to understand why I was doing it.”
–Greta, body piercer
——————————————
“There were times in my life when I couldn’t feel anything any
more. Everything became too much. I felt numb all the time. I
couldn’t feel happy or sad.”
–Greta, body piercer
——————————————
“Girls ask to suck my blood. They aren’t too shy about asking
me. I can easily show you scars all over me where I’ve taken
razor blades and opened myself up and let them stick their
tongues into me.”
–Peter Steele
——————————————
“For a long time, I did not know who I was, I did not know what I
wanted. I was crushed by peer pressure, and I listened to a lot
of people because I was told by a lot of people around me that I
was a moron. And now I’ve realized that it’s not me that’s
fucked up. It is the rest of the world. I’m certainly not a
genius but I believe I’ve found myself.”
–Peter Steele
——————————————
“I think I’m a blue-collar worker from Brooklyn. This thing just
fell into my lap and it is an opportunity to escape urban blight.
I’m a social retard, and I have a hard time dealing with people.
I don’t like crowds, I don’t like noise, I don’t like people, I
don’t like being questioned. I just want to be left alone.”
–Peter Steele
——————————————
“Censorship is almost systematically the weapon of first resort
for governments in uncertain political situations. So not only
are the famous writers and bold journalists in danger; at every
level of public and private life, the freedoms to think, read or
write are denied.

In the absence of a free press, other human rights abuses
flourish unabated. Nothing is reported, criticized, questioned.
The example of imprisonment, torture or execution imposes a
further silence. A blindly obedient mob mentality is encouraged,
driven by extremist religious or ethnic loyalties. The citizens
do not know what is happening. Fear and ignorance permeate
discussion.”
–Marian Botsford Fraser
——————————————
“To start blindly with a statement is a sign of arrogance and
narrow-mindedness, and will lead to conflict. To start blindly
with a question is a sign of uncertainty and honesty, and will
lead to wisdom.”
–Scott “Jesus” Watson
——————————————
“You’ve seen [angst] (you know you have) late at night, in a
mirror. It has deep, hollow eyes — too exhausted to close —
and looks like someone you thought you knew.”
–Dirk John Fischer
——————————————
“Wake when others wake. Take what others take.
Feed when others feed. Need what others need.
Share what others share. Care when others care.
Feel what others feel. Is it real?

If you love what others love. You will never rise above.
You will stay where others stay. Play games they like to play.

And when they grow tired, you will fall asleep.
Because to follow is the nature of the sheep.”
–Luke Gasteiger
——————————————
“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from
time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
–Oscar Wilde
——————————————
“True education makes for inequality; the inequality of
individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality
of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual
superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress
of the world.”
–Felix E. Schelling
——————————————
“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape
of the spoon.”
–E. M. Forster
——————————————
“The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins
to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he
is being educated.”
–James Baldwin
——————————————
“It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in
a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
–James Baldwin
——————————————
“The real leader has no need to lead — he is content to point
the way.”
–Henry Miller
——————————————
“The art of leadership… consists in consolidating the attention
of the people against a single adversary and taking care that
nothing will split up that attention… The leader of genius must
have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they
belonged to one category.”
–Adolf Hitler
——————————————
“I read the news today oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph.
He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen his face before
Nobody was really sure
If he was from the House of Lords.”
–The Beatles
——————————————
“Fear, it’s the oldest tool of power. If you’re distracted by
fear of those around you, it keeps you from seeing the actions of
those above.”
–from The X-Files
——————————————
“Reporters crowd around you house,
Going through you garbage like a pack of hounds
Speculating what they might find out,
It don’t matter now, you’re all washed up.

You wake up in the middle of the night
You sheets are wet and your face is white,
You tried to make a good thing last,
How could something so good, go bad, so fast.”
–Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young
——————————————
“There was thunder
There was lightning
Then the stars went out
And the moon fell from the sky…”
–Tom Waits
——————————————
“I’m just hoping that one day the sheep will realize that the
shepherd is really a wolf in disguise.”
–Sanjay Singh
——————————————
“Fifty or sixty shooters had already arrived and managed to look
studiously bored. I knew a few of them and nodded politely. No
one asked me to sit next to them, nor would I have accepted if
they had. It’s better that way, in case you end up on opposite
sides of a fight, and a whole lot safer. Friends can betray you.
Strangers can’t.”
–William C. Deitz
——————————————
“You thought you knew what pain was. You thought that whatever
happened, you could handle it. You thought that you were in
control. You thought wrong. Now you’ve lost it all. She’s
gone. All that’s left is the numbing pain. You have to let go
to stop the pain, but you can’t. It’s like a drug to you now.
You don’t want to need it, but it has become a part of you, and
it won’t loosen its grip on you. The control you once fought
for, is gone. You have no control. And you just don’t care.”
–Sanjay Singh
——————————————
“You’ve bought into the ‘system’ your whole life, and it got you
nowhere. You were at the top of your class in high school, you
were the darling of your sorority, and people still treated you
like your success was a way to prove their ‘system’ was right.
No more. You get by on your own… with the help of someone who
works for you now.”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“The world is his canvas, and he wants to take up sculpting.”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“You are inspired. Anything you say is brilliant, especially if
it contradicts what other people normally believe. Create!
Destroy! Live!”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“[He] does not belong; reality itself does not accept his surreal
visions. Why hold back? Why shouldn’t he reshape the world into
something that will accept him? He’s been shut out long enough.”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“Obviously, [she] should learn a little about reality. True love
does not conquer all. How foolish she is to believe in ‘young
love.’ Stories like that always end in tears. Her romance
certainly did. Seeing young lovers most [her], because it
reminds her of her own pain — the pain her Psyche and her need
for blissful passion gave her.”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“The true artist must be open to anything! Expand your mind,
man; stretch it like a big red balloon! You think that’s crazy!
Look at all the unhappy people, look at all the conformity, and
I’ll tell you what’s really crazy. Whee! Ants!”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“One must follow what interests one, yes? Life is an exploration
of the mind, an exploration of reality. Care for some brie?”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“They found the dog in several pieces in the trash can, occult
symbols carved into its fur and something horrible in its mouth.
They found the old man hanging from the ceiling in his study, the
plastic on the floor was arranged so that none of the blood
stained the lily white carpet. They discovered the child hunched
down in a closet covered in her own waste, the tears dried away,
the hollow eyes looking out at nothing.

They say not to go into the Fifth Street alley at night — it’s
just not safe. They say that the library is haunted — that
sometimes you can feel the crinkle of plastic under your feet.
But you don’t care what they say, ’cause you know she’s in your
closet — when you close your eyes to sleep you can still hear
her muffled screams and the little hands beating at the door…”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“This thing is a man. Look at what you are, and what awaits you.
Gaze on this image and learn what your own end will be.”
–Greek epitaph
——————————————
“Learn the true topography; the monstrous and wonderful
archetypes are not inside you, not inside your consciousness; you
are inside them, trapped and howling to get out.”
–R. A. Lafferty
——————————————
“I see the witching moon moving in swift arc, yet not driving
with her full face shining night long like torchlight luring in a
graveyard. She glows as when magicians spells torment her reins
taught. She holds course, hogging the horizon moon. Now your
fire has hues of deathly pallor. Pour waves of grim light on the
winds to frighten mankind.

On grass red with bloodstains, I offer your beasts ritually
butchered for you a fire torch snatched from a cremation burns in
the night; for you I arch and toss back my head. I sing, I loose
my hair, then bind it with sacred headband, and they do at
funerals. For you I grip this bough shrivelled with deaths dew.
For you I bare my breast, slice into my arms with holy knife,
shed my sanity and blood forever.”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“Death is but a stepping over, a passage through the Shroud. The
moment of death is a rite of passage marking the end of one
journey and the beginning of another, a path available to us at
any time.

The thousands of things undone, the millions of roads not
travelled, the longings and regrets; they do not die with the
body. Instead they linger on and take a life of their own. They
become ghosts. They become shadows.

Trapped between this world and the next, wraiths are lost in the
immortal gloom of damnation. Held together out of pure misery,
they are trapped by their past, their longings and their fear.
Many are the products of sudden, violent or cruel deaths. They
are bound by a sense of crucial deeds undone, of unsaid words
breaking in their hearts, of a life cut short by Fate. Others
are consumed by a tragic longing for happiness and fulfilment
denied them in life. A few are driven by bitterness, anger or
passionate ideals.”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“I can’t feel you anymore
I can’t even touch the books you’ve read
I followed you beneath the stars
Hounded by your memory
And all your raging glory
But now I’m finally free
I kiss good-bye the howling beast
That separated you from me
You’ll never know the hurt I suffered
Nor the pain I rise above
And I’ll never know the same about you,
But soon we’ll be together
In the clasp of oblivion.”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy.
One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when
one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect
of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on
the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of
life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure
— fearlessness and achievement.”
–Joseph Campbell
——————————————
“With each passing day oblivion encroaches further. With every
soul that surrenders to shadow, the end draws nearer. The world
is not as we knew it, decay’s sweet stench now clings to all we
once held dear. It is called the Shadowlands. In death there is
nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, from the hate and fear, the pain
and bitterness, the shadow within. Hope is fragile and few have
the courage, the passion, to face death, and say, ‘I do not go
gentle into that good night.'”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“Like you, I am broken and fragile
Like you, I am tasting my heart for the first time
Like you, I am feeding on slumber
Like you, I’ve left my eyes far behind me
Down for the count and still drowning…”
–Christian Death
——————————————
“You may never understand
How the stranger is inspired
For he is always evil,
And he is not always wrong…”
–Billy Joel
——————————————
“Come with me on wings of dream. I can take you anywhere you
want to go — would you like to have dinner with [her]? Sip
cappuccino on the canals of Mars? Walk with me though the
Elysian Fields? I promise to have you back before you wake.”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“All around you reverberate the songs of the dead. You hear them
echoing in high cathedrals, in darkened auditoriums, in your own
sleep. All around you wail the songs of the dead: dare you not
listen? Listen to what has been sung. Since their death!”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“‘Do you trust me?’ I asked her. I held out my hand. ‘Do you
want to see beyond the darkness?’ She nodded slowly, and took my
hand…”
–from Wraith: The Oblivion
——————————————
“Swift as light and as cheers was the idea that broke in upon me.
‘I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; I need
only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.'”
–Mary Shelly
——————————————
“I act the role in classic style of a martyr
Carved with a twisted smile,
To bleed the lyric for this song
To write the rites to right my wrongs
An epitaph to a broken dream
To exorcise tis silent scream
A scream that’s borne from sorrow.”
–Marillion
——————————————
“Oh children don’t you weep and moan
Children save your breath
You’ll draw a pretty pension
When your daddy meets his death.”
–“Hard Times” (traditional ballad)
——————————————
“It was the best of times and the worst of times, and it was all
of them at once.”
–Alan Moore
——————————————
“Death followed by eternity… the worst of both worlds. It is a
terrible thought.”
–from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
——————————————
“There were the days when you peered into your self, into the
secret places of your heard, and what you saw there made you fair
with horror. And then, next day, you didn’t know what to make of
it, you couldn’t interpret the horror you had glimpsed the day
before. Yes, you know what evil costs.”
–Jean-Paul Sartre
——————————————
“The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound — and yet he
sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard subside and
allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected
were lurking behind them.”
–H.P. Lovecraft
——————————————
“Darkness, darkness
Be my blanket
Cover me with the endless night
Take away the pain of knowing.”
–The Youngbloods
——————————————
“The night is my companion, and solitude my guide.”
–Sarah McLaughlin
——————————————
“He who pretends to look upon death without fear, lies.”
–Jean-Jacques Rousseau
——————————————
“Someone stole my heart. I haven’t gotten it back, because I
haven’t found anyone to steal it back for me.”
–Scott “Jesus” Watson
——————————————
“Justice to the left of you
Justice to the right
Speak when you are spoken to
Don’t pretend you’re right
This life’s not for living
It’s for fighting and for wars
No matter what the truth is
Hold on to what is yours.”
–Yes
——————————————
“Sometimes you want to run away
Sometimes you think you do
But you never had a dream like this before
And you don’t want to ask for more
Sometimes you leave a mark
Before you know the score.”
–Ric Ocasek
——————————————
“The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism
after you lose your innocence.”
–Bruce Springsteen
——————————————
“A life is not important, except in the impact it has on other
lives.”
–Jackie Robinson
——————————————
“I see your face in every flame
With no answers I have only myself to blame
Of all the women I have known — they’re not you
I’d rather be alone.”
–Type O Negative
——————————————
“I always thought we’d be together
And that our love could not be better
Well with no warning you were gone
I still don’t know what went wrong
You don’t know what I’ve been through
Just want to put my love in you.”
–Type O Negative
——————————————
“So you’ve come to say you’re very sorry
‘It won’t happen again — forgive me?’
Time will not heal these wounds
And I’m bleeding because of you.

Was everything we had just a joke?
I’ve run out of patience, tears, and hope
Love does not conquer all
And I’m screaming because of you.

In the shadow of the light from a black sun
Frigid statue standing icy blue and numb
Where are the frost giants I’ve begged for protection?
I’m freezing.”
–Type O Negative
——————————————
“A crimson pool so warm and deep
Lulls me to an endless sleep
You hand in mine — I will be brave
Take me from this earth
An endless night — this, the end of life
From the dark I feel your lips
And I taste your bloody kiss.”
–Type O Negative
——————————————
“Not long ago but far away
A rainy winter’s day
All her pain she kept inside
Could no longer hide
No cry for help
She killed herself
Both life and love could not be saved
She took them both to the grave.”
–Type O Negative
——————————————
“See the smile awaitin’ in the kitchen
Food cookin’ and the plates for two
Feel the arms that reach out to hold me
In the evening when the day is through.”
–Seals & Crofts
——————————————
“See the curtains hangin’ in the window
In the evening on a Friday night
A little light-a-shinin’ through the window
Let’s me know everything’s all right.”
–Seals & Crofts
——————————————
“It’s not that I don’t have a conscience, it’s just that why
should I feel guilty for my present crimes, when my past ones are
so much worse?”
–Sanjay Singh
——————————————
“The Humanist lives as if this world were all and enough. He is
not otherworldly. He holds that the time spent on the
contemplation of a possible afterlife is time wasted. He fears
no hell and seeks no heaven, save that which he and others
created on earth. He willingly accepts the world that exists on
this side of the grave as the place for moral struggle and
creative living. He seeks the life abundant for his neighbour as
for himself. He is content to live one world at a time and let
the next life — if such there may be — take care of itself. He
need not deny immortality; he simply is not interested. His
interests are here.”
–Edwin H. Wilson
——————————————
“Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality:
they are the perfect duties. If your morals make you dreary,
depend on it they are wrong. I do not say, ‘give them up,’ for
they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they
should spoil the lives of better men.”
–Robert Louis Stevenson
——————————————
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does

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