Faber in Fahrenheit 451
It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books...There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us...
Do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.
The Power and the Glory
It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.
The Pale King
Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. There is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth — actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one...No one is interested.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
Kubla Khan
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
A Group of Servants, Mark Twain
The other maid, Wuthering Heights (which is not her name), is about forty and looks considerably younger. She is quick, smart, active, energetic, breezy, good-natured, has a high-keyed voice and a loud one, talks thirteen to the dozen, talks all the time, talks in her sleep, will talk when she is dead; is here, there, and everywhere all at the same time, and is consumingly interested in every devilish thing that is going on. Particularly if it is not her affair. And she is not merely passively interested, but takes a hand; and not only takes a hand but the principal one; in fact will play the whole game, fight the whole battle herself, if you don't find some way to turn her flank.
Paul Samuelson
To prove that Wall Street is an early omen of movements still to come in GNP, commentators quote economic studies alleging that market downturns predicted four out of the last five recessions. That is an understatement. Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions! And its mistakes were beauties.
Science and Method, Henri Poincaré
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living.
HPMOR discussion, Wardaft
Everybody has blind spots. Nobody ever actually thinks they're wrong, even if they won't stop writing about how 'not to be wrong' and the various ways how everyone is actually wrong without realizing it. In fact, especially then.
Short story by Haruki Murakami
Now, of course, I know exactly what I should have said to her. It would have been a long speech, though, far too long for me to have delivered it properly. The ideas I come up with are never very practical.
Oh, well. It would have started "Once upon a time" and ended "A sad story, don't you think?"
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit?
, Chris Baty
Either I was a monster, or none of us were monsters. I did some quick calculations and decided, for the sake of my self-image, that none of us were monsters. We were just busy. With our hearts in the right places and way too much going on in our lives...
HHGG
There is art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss...Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.
on love:
We're all cynics and romantics, sometimes simultaneously... High Fidelity
Love begins with a metaphor. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
why the lucky stiff
Reality's kind of a medium, maybe greater than paper. We all want life to have the same texture that we read about in novels.
Stephen King, On Writing
For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room—no more child’s desk in a trailer laundry-closet, no more cramped kneehole in a rented house. In 1981 I got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study (it’s a converted stable loft at the rear of the house). For six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship’s captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere.
See also, uncollected stuff: quotes
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