Ian > Ian's Quotes

“May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.”
― George Carlin

“Colder than the nipple on a witch’s tit! Colder than a bucket of penguin shit! Colder than the hairs of a polar bear’s ass! Colder than the frost on a champagne glass!”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.”
― George Orwell, Coming up for Air

“Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.

What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don’t force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don’t understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“Arkady was an Investigator of Special Cases, and if a bear running loose in the heart of Moscow was not a special case, he didn't know what was.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, The Siberian Dilemma

“The one thing that stung Zhenya was the insinuation that he ducked the best players,
"Anyone I play it's their choice," Zhenya said. "I can't help it if I'm better than they are. Sometimes I play a rook or a bishop down. What could be fairer than that?"
"They never know what hit them," Sosi said; her eyes grew as round as moons. She looked like the perfect fanatic to encourage a leap into a volcano. She rolled a rook back and forth on the Formica, as if she were gathering an electric charge. "Zhenya can turn any game into a slaughter."
It was like visiting the Macbeths, Arkady thought.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, The Siberian Dilemma

“As Seward did not understand the reference, he did not ask for an explanation. In any case, he had a constitutional dislike of being told things that he did not know, as opposed to ferreting them out.”
― Gore Vidal, Lincoln

“Do you know a cure for me?"

"Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water."

"Salt water?" I asked him.

"Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“I looked you up, Arkady. You have a checkered career."
"I'm flattered. I was unaware of having any career at all.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, The Siberian Dilemma

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
"Pooh!" he whispered.
"Yes, Piglet?"
"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you.”
― A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

“[T]here is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises—no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”
― Stephen Fry

“In hindsight, Khrushchev stands out as a rare case of a nuclear optimist. His nuclear brinkmanship was exceptionally crude and aggressive, reckless and ideology-driven. The architect of the New Look played hardball. But he relied more on his instincts than on strategic calculations. And he was not a master of diplomatic compromise. His improvisations, lack of tact, rudeness, and spontaneity let him down, after several strokes of luck. His ideological beliefs, coupled with his emotional vacillations between insecurity and overconfidence, made him a failure as a negotiator.”
― Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev

“I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.”
― Mae West

“Love is not weakness. It's the bravest act of our lives.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“Apparently, men grew wiser with every grey hair, while women just grew invisible.”
― Belinda Bauer, The Beautiful Dead

“Before there is science, there are stories to explain the world. They make it happier somehow.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me