This collection of quotations began in early 2005. They have come from books, poems, essays, and songs. They are in no order, and have had minimal formatting applied to them.

Last update: 09/08/08

"I can think of no street in America, or of people inhabiting such a street, capable of leading one on towards the discovery of the self. I have walked the streets in many countris of the world but nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America. I think of all the streets in American combined as forming a huge cesspool, a cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away to everlasting shit. Over this cesspool the spirit of work weave a magic wand; palaces and factories spring up side by side, and munition plants and chemical works and steel mills and sanatoriums and prisons and insane asylums. The whole continent is a nightmare producing the greatest misery of the greatest number. I was one, a single entity in the midst of the greatest jamboree of wealth and happiness (statistical wealth, statistical happiness) but I never met a man who was truly wealthy or truly happy. [...] I am the evil product of an evil soil."
—Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

"I wish people considered their leaders as expendable as they consider you."
—Christopher Hitchens

"The temple is holy because it is not for sale."
—Ezra Pound, "Cantos," XCVII

"I love too the spare, the hit-or-miss,
the mad, I sometimes can't always tell them apart
As we fall apart, will you let me hear?"
—John Berryman, "Dream Song 265"

"That's a cop-out, and you know it, and it breaks my heart into a thousand pieces that we ain't gonna save America with your blog today."
—Achewood

"give everything south of denver to mexico and everything north to canada. murder every white person in both"
—LF

"Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away.... To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives."
—Jean-Paul Sartre, "Being and Nothingness"

"No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy-store and have two stomachs."
—H.L. Mencken, "The Art Eternal"

"All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely. ... The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all"
—H. L. Mencken, "Quid Est Veritas?"

"Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?"
—Sergeant Dan Daly, United States Marine Corps, Battle of Belleau Wood, June 1917

"Ah, my ridiculously circuitous plan is one-quarter complete!"
—Robot Devil, Futurama, "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings"

"If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence."
—George Eliot

"It is the business of educated people to speak so that no-one may be able to tell in what county their childhood was passed."
—A. Burrell, "Recitation. A Handbook for Teachers in Public Elementary School", 1891

"Stephen is in his story because he's an exceptional subject who must and will be known. But Tess? Without her beauty, she'd have been left out of the sweep and horror of large events. A girl learns that stories happen to 'beautiful' women, whether they are interesting or not. And, interesting or not, stories do not happen to women who are not 'beautiful.'"
—Naomi Wolf, "The Beauty Myth" (p. 61)

"Sometimes I hate beauty because I don't have any choice about loving it. I must be wrong in this, but whether because I take freedom too seriously, or love, I cannot tell."
—James Richardson, "Interglacial"

"Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to revenge himself therefore: we others will be his victims, if only by always having to give stand to his ugly sight. For the sight of the ugly makes men bad and gloomy."
—Nietzsche, "The Gay Science"

"Of all animals, the boy is the most unmanageable."
—Plato, "Laws"

"I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear."
—George Eliot, letters

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."
—Gore Vidal

"No one should come to live in New York unless he is willing to be lucky."
—E.B. White

"1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."
—George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties."
—Francis Bacon

"The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta."
—Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash"

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
—John Muir, "My First Summer in the Sierra"

"... no practical definition of freedom would be completely without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based."
—Terry Pratchett, "Going Postal"

"Half the world wants to be like Thoreau at Walden worrying about the noise of traffic on the way to Boston; the other half use up their lives being part of that noise. I like the second half."
—Franz Kline

"Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom."
—Ecclesiastes 9:10

"The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces."
—Simone de Beauvoir, "The Ethics of Ambiguity"

"In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men."
—Simone de Beauvoir, "The Ethics of Ambiguity"

"The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time."
—W.B. Yeats

"THE human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun."
—G.K. Chesterton, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill"

"I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear."
—William Blake, "London"

"I must Create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's.
I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create."
—William Blake, "The Poet's Motto"

"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."
—Jean-Paul Sartre

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."
—Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash" p. 271

"Whatever system an INTJ happens to be working on is for them the equivalent of a moral cause [...] both perfectionism and disregard for authority may come into play." (http://typelogic.com/intj.html)

“Around here, this is what passes for reality.”
—Chuck Palahniuk, "Lullaby"

"'This Snow Crash thing. Is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?'"
Juanita shrugs. 'What's the difference?'"
—Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash" p. 200

"If I had amnesia, I'd be almost like other men. Perhaps I'd even be able to love you."
—Simone de Beauvoir, "All Men Are Mortal"

"There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime."
—John Berryman, "Dream Song XXIX"

"I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather."
—Henry David Thoreau, "I am a parcel of vain strivings"

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
—Krishnamurti

"He read greedily but understood selectively, choosing the bits and pieces of other men's ideas that supported whatever predilection he had at the moment. Thus he chose to remember Hamlet's abuse of Ophelia, but not Christ's love of Mary Magdalene; Hamlet's frivolous politics but not Christ's serious anarchy. He noticed Gibbon's acidity but not his tolerance, Othello's love for Desdemona, but not Iago's perverted love of Othello. The works he admired most were Dante's; those he despised most were Dostoyevsky's. For all his exposure to the best minds of the Western world, he allowed only the narrowest interpretation to touch him."
—Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

"I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead."
—William Lloyd Garrison, "To the Public", No. 1

"(A)n Agnostic may hold that the existence of God, though not impossible, is very improbable; he may even hold it so improbable that it is not worth considering in practice. In that case, he is not far removed from atheism."
—Bertrand Russell, "What is an Agnostic?"

"No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything."
—Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

"Chekhov’s characters forget to be Chekhov’s characters. We see this most beautifully in one of his earliest stories, ‘The Kiss’, written when he was twenty-seven. A virginal soldier kisses a woman for the first time in his life. He hoards the memory of it, and bursts to tell his fellow soldiers about his experience. Yet when he does tell them, he is disappointed because his story takes only a short minute to tell, yet ‘he had imagined it would take until morning’. One notices that many of Chekhov’s characters are disappointed by the stories they tell, and somewhat jealous of other people’s stories. But to be disappointed by one’s own story is an extraordinarily subtle freedom in literature, for it implies a character’s freedom to be disappointed not only by his own story but, by extension, by the story Chekhov has given him. Thus he wriggles out of Chekhov’s story into the bottomless freedom of disappointment. He is always trying to make his own story out of the story Chekhov has given him, and even this freedom of disappointment will be disappointing. (That this freedom is awarded and managed by the author is of course a trivial paradox: how else could it arise?) And yet it is a freedom. We see this so finely in ‘The Kiss’. The soldier forgets that he is in Chekhov’s story because he has become so involved in his own. His own story is bottomless, and yearns to last all night; Chekhov’s story ‘takes only a minute to tell’. In Chekhov’s world, our inner lives run at their own speed. They are laxly calendared. They live in their own gentle almanac, and in his stories the free inner life bumps against the outer life like two different time-systems, like the Julian calendar against the Gregorian. This was what Chekhov meant by 'life'. This was his revolution."
—James Wood, "What Chekhov Meant By Life"

"Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop, than when we soar."
—William Wordsworth, The Excursion Book III - Despondency, l. 231

"But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?
Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it found in the land of the living."
—Job 28:13-14

"I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby"

"I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of "work" because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep."
—Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1918

"Most people who give you advice, it’s a complete derivative of their own fears. And it’s aimed at the fat part of the bat. You can hit a ball with the tip of the bat or even right by your fingertips. It will connect and you can hit it. But everyone’s like, “Let’s just aim right here. Let’s do the high-percentage thing.” And I’m not really interested in that."
—Demetri Martin, interviewed in The Believer

"Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime."
—Jacob Bronowski, "The Sense of Dignity"

"Writers are not, by nature, respectable: their function is to be subversive."
—Anthony Burgess, "Homage to QWERTY UIOP"

"To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world."
—Anthony Burgess, "Homage to QWERTY UIOP"

"The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England"

"A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one."
—Neil Postman

"We will live our lives so well death will tremble to take us."
—Charles Bukowski

"Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attraction of others."
—Oscar Wilde

"Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy, the joy of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself in rapture, 'What wonderful things is Salvador Dali going to accomplish today?'"
—Salvador Dali

"Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic."
—Albert Camus, "Rebellion and Revolution"

Aristippus: "If you would only learn to flatter the king, you wouldn't have to live on lentils."
Diogenes: "Learn to live on lentils, and you won't have to flatter the king."

"The truth is ugly: we have art so as not to perish from the truth."
—Friedrich Nietzsche

"Time to plant tears, says the almanac."
—Elizabeth Bishop

"My country is the world, and my religion is to do good."
—Thomas Paine, "Rights of Man"

"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."
—Voltaire

"To sit alone with my conscience will be judgment enough for me."
—Charles William Stubbs

"I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."
—Margaret Atwood

"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
—Richard Dawkins

"Those shells, as unique and timeless as bones, helped me realize that we all die young, that in the life of the earth, we are all houseflies, here for one flash of light."
—Jim Lynch, "The Highest Tide"

"It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if
they cannot find it."
—Charlotte Bronte, "Jane Eyre"

"As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods."
—Bertrand Russell

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
—Oscar Wilde

"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."
—Rainer Marie Rilke

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
—Franz Kafka

"There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?'"
—Kurt Vonnegut, "Slaughterhouse-Five"

"All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies."
—Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"

"The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others."
—Friedrich Nietzsche

"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."
—Soren Kierkegaard

"Why are you so into Pinot?"
"Uh, I don't know, I don't know. Um, it's a hard grape to grow, as you know. Right? It's uh, it's thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It's, you know, it's not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and uh, thrive even when it's neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. You know? And in fact it can only grow in these really specific little tucked-away corners of the world. And only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot's potential can then coax it into its fullest expression."
—Sideways

"When life gives you lemons you squeeze them, hard. Make invisible ink. Make an acid poison. Fling it in their eyes."
—Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

"The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife."
—Thomas Merton

"Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think."
—Horace Walpole

"You might not see things yet on the surface, but underground, it's already on fire."
—M.B. Mangunwijaya

"I decided then I don't want anyone. The heart is paper and any jerk with half a face can call you a name and turn it to ashes."
—Bryan Charles, Grab On to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way

"Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as idleness."
—Thomas Carlyle

[[Ad nocendum potentes sumus.]]
We all have the power to do harm.
—Seneca

"Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought."
—Alan Watts

"We begin to move from the knowledge that nothing need be done."
—Alan Watts

"There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it."
—E. M. Forster, A Room With a View

"Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must be a sea to be able to receive a polluted stream without becoming unclean."
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathrustra

"Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain hidden from him."
—Franz Kafka

"'D'you know what happens when you hurt people?' Ammu said. 'When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.'"
—Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

"Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition."
—Walter Savage Landor, from "The Dial, XII"

"The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The ancestor of every action is a thought."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Your goodness must have some edge to it, —else it is none."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one."
—Voltaire

"If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor."
—Voltaire

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."
—Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

"I could not care less about hypothetical possibilities, and the meandering abstractions of the futurologists leave me cold. If I write, it is not, as they say, "for others." I have no wish to exorcise other people's ghosts. I string words together as a way of getting out of the well of isolation, because I need others to pull me out. I write out of impatience, and with impatience. I want to live without dead time. What other people say interests me only in as much as it concerns me directly. They must use me to save themselves just as I use them to save myself. We have a common project. But it is out of the question that the project of the whole man should entail a reduction in individuality. There are no degrees in castration. The apolitical violence of the young, and its contempt for the interchangeable goods displayed in the supermarkets of culture, art and ideology, are a concrete confirmation of the fact that the individual's self-realization depends on the application of the principle of "every man for himself," though this has to be understood in collective terms—and above all in radical terms."
—Raoul Vaneigem, "The Revolution of Everyday Life"

"The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: "For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages," what reason could he give for refusing? But nobody says this. The self-appointed unqualified nurse says: "You are to sing the patient a song which will make him believe that I, and I alone, can cure him. If you can't or won't, I shall confiscate your passport and send you to the mines." And the poor patient in his delirium cries: "Please sing me a song which will give me sweet dreams instead of nightmares. If you succeed, I will give you a penthouse in New York or a ranch in Arizona.""
—W. H. Auden, "The Dyer's Hand"

"I am nothing original but a lover of bridges other people have crossed and a collector of roads I am too late to travel and too weak to mend."
—Simon Joyner

"Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart."
—Haruki Murakami, "Kafka on the Shore"

"I always figured we were born to fly, one way or another, so I couldn't stand most men shuffling along with all the iron of the earth in their blood. I never met a man who weighed less than nine hundred pounds. In their black business suits, you could hear them roll by like funeral wagons."
—Ray Bradbury, "The Day it Rawed Forever"

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
—H. L. Mencken

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
—Richard Dawkins

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

"[[Algún día en cualquier parte, en cualquier lugar indefectiblemente te encontrarás a ti mismo, y ésa, sólo ésa, puede ser la más feliz o la más amarga de tus horas.]]"

"Someday, somewhere— anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life."
—Pablo Neruda

"One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."
—Anton Checkhov

"A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were."
—Milan Kundera, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

"The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes."
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Slaughterhouse-Five"

"Of those to whom much is given, much shall be required."
—The New Testament, Luke 12:48

"One of God's greatest mercies is that he keeps us perpetually occluded. [...] Infinite are the mercies of God."
—Philip K. Dick, "VALIS"

"What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."
—Philip K. Dick, "VALIS"

"Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking."
—Quentin Crisp

"War is what happens when language fails."
—Margaret Atwood

"I am a beautiful dangerous image coming from eternity."
—Rob Breszny

"Daniel saw in a way he'd never seen anything before: his mind was a homunculus squatting in the middle of his skull, peering out through good but imperfect telescopes and listening-horns, gathering observations that had been distorted along the way, as a lens put chromatic aberrations into all the light that passed through it. A man who peered out at the world through a telescope would assume that the aberration was real, that the stars actually looked like that—what false assumptions, then, had natural philosophers been making about the evidence of their senses, until last night? Sitting in the gaudy radiance of those windows hearing the organ play and the choir sing, his mind pleasantly intoxicated from exhaustion, Daniel experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears."
—Neal Stephenson, "Quicksilver"

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."
—Milan Kundera, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

"The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway."
-–Margaret Atwood, "The Handmaid's Tale"

"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."
—Kurt Vonnegut

""He was not satisfied with the way things stood now; he was a man who had come in sight of a goal, then had won it, and in winning it had seen just within his grasp another goal, higher, greater. He had learned to shout and had shouted and no ear had heard him; he had just learned to walk and was walking but could not see the ground beneath his feet."
—Richard Wright, Native Son

"Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing."
—Omar Khayyám, "The Rubáiyát" VII

"We have contraptions like computers that cheat you out of becoming. Bill Gates says, 'Wait till you see what your computer can become.' But it's you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do."
—Kurt Vonnegut

"Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."
—Red Smith

"Sometimes it feels like I'm both the prisoner and the warden in a movie about a guy who didn't do it."
—Bob Hicok, "Morphology, or the study of morphing"

"Teacher seeks pupil, must have an earnest desire to save the world."
—Daniel Quinn, "Ishmael"

"Museums: cemeteries!... Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!

That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’ Day—that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that... But I don’t admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot?

And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely?... Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off, in violent spasms of action and creation."
—F.T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism"

"Do you ever feel like the wagons of your thoughts
have circled and you're inside, being shot at?
And you're rooting for those doing the shooting?"
—Bob Hicok, "Morphology, or the study of morphing"

"I went to the summit and stood in the high nakedness:
the wind tore about this
way and that in confusion and its speech could not
get through to me nor could I address it:
still I said as if to the alien in myself
I do not speak to the wind now:
for having been brought this far by nature I have been
brought out of nature
and nothing here shows me the image of myself"
—A.R. Ammons, "For Harold Bloom"

"Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me."
—"The Red Poppy", Louise Glück

"Our interest's on the
dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist."
—Robert Browning, "Bishop Blougram's Apology"

"Ignorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone."
—Oscar Wilde

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
—Plato

"Let us go to war. The world has become stale and insipid, the ships ought to be all captured, and the cities battered down, and the world burned up, so that we can start again. There would be fun in that. Some interest,—something to talk about."
—New York Journal of Commerce

"As Milo and his unhappy thoughts hurried along (for while he was never anxious to be where he was going, he liked to get there as quickly as possible) it seemed a great wonder that the world, which was so large, could sometimes feel so small and empty."
-–Norman Juster, "The Phantom Tollbooth"

"You will go most safely in the middle."
—Ovid

"What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,
Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
Scattering it freely forever."
—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

"When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself."
—Jacques-Yves Coutseau

"No, they said, you see this wrongly. (Meantime they had removed several ribs, and pulled the spleen out and away, that mystery organ, and stuffed a squat black glass bottle of liqueur in its place, Latvian balsam, he was later to be told.)
You see this wrongly, in that long before you began to express yourself (what a funny expression that is, too) with language, language was busy shaping — is that what you mean by expressing? No, I guess not — language was busy shaping you."
—Kelly, "How They Took My Body Apart and Made Another Me"

"When I was in my teens, making a few stabs at writing, I had a very low opinion of experience. It did not seem to me that trekking to the cobwebbed corners of the world for six months and returning with a pair of ethnic trousers made anybody a more interesting fellow than when they left. Weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable were all the uses of the world to me— which meant, of course, that I was not much good at anything and had no friends."
—Zadie Smith

"Anything worth doing is worth doing badly."
—Jack Gilbert, "Failing and Flying"

"The world is all forgetting, and the heart is a rage of directions, but your name unifies the heart, and the world is lifted into its place. Blessed is the one who waits in the traveler's heart for his returning."
—Leonard Cohen, Poem 50

"I’m a fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberal, and I think fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberalism is an ideological stance that needs defending—if necessary, with a hob-nailed boot-kick to the bollocks of budding totalitarianism."
—Charlie Stross

"This origami dream is beautiful but man, those wings will never leave the ground / Without a feather and a lottery ticket, now settle down."
—Aesop Rock, "Daylight"

"I get what I want but got no one to share it with,
A feeling in my chest and nothing to compare it with."
—Buck 65

Powdermaker

"_Not_ encouraging students to question knowledge, society, and experience tacitly endorses and supports the status quo."
—Ira Shor

"Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave."
—Michel Foucault

"Education for domestication is an act of transferring 'knowledge,' whereas education for freedom is an act of knowledge and a process of transforming action that should be exercised on reality."
—Paulo Freire

"Education is _inherently_ an ethical and political act."
—Michael Apple

"The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created."
—bell hooks

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