Juliano > Juliano's Quotes

“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“And I thought about how, actually, if you wanted to, you could say the same thing about life. That life is terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when you’re confronted with life you can either be cowardly or you can be brave, but either way you’re going to live. So you might as well be brave.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“I ducked the party, lost the crowds, and took a walk,” he said years later. “Just me and Oscar! I think I relived my entire lifetime that night as I walked up and down the streets of Beverly Hills. Even when a cop stopped me, he couldn’t bring me down to earth. It was very nice of him, although I did have to wait until his partner came cruising to assure him that I was who I said I was and that I had not stolen the statue I was carrying.” But he had not stolen the statue. He was Frank Sinatra.”
― James Kaplan, Frank: The Voice

“Well, I’ve found just the contrary,’ I said. ‘It seems to me that when you take a man’s money away he’s fit for nothing from that moment.’ ‘No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, “I’m a free man in HERE”’—he tapped his forehead—‘and you’re all right.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“A moth goes into a podiatrist’s office, and the podiatrist’s office says, “What seems to be the problem, moth?”

The moth says “What’s the problem? Where do I begin, man? I go to work for Gregory Illinivich, and all day long I work. Honestly doc, I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore. I don’t even know if Gregory Illinivich knows. He only knows that he has power over me, and that seems to bring him happiness. But I don’t know, I wake up in a malaise, and I walk here and there… at night I…I sometimes wake up and I turn to some old lady in my bed that’s on my arm. A lady that I once loved, doc. I don’t know where to turn to. My youngest, Alexendria, she fell in the…in the cold of last year. The cold took her down, as it did many of us. And my other boy, and this is the hardest pill to swallow, doc. My other boy, Gregarro Ivinalititavitch… I no longer love him. As much as it pains me to say, when I look in his eyes, all I see is the same cowardice that I… that I catch when I take a glimpse of my own face in the mirror. If only I wasn’t such a coward, then perhaps…perhaps I could bring myself to reach over to that cocked and loaded gun that lays on the bedside behind me and end this hellish facade once and for all…Doc, sometimes I feel like a spider, even though I’m a moth, just barely hanging on to my web with an everlasting fire underneath me. I’m not feeling good. And so the doctor says, “Moth, man, you’re troubled. But you should be seeing a psychiatrist. Why on earth did you come here?”

And the moth says, “‘Cause the light was on.”
― Norm Macdonald

“We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“Traditions are not killed by facts.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“What I cannot admit within, which by definition is a Shadow issue, I can militantly deny without. This is why I become the fanatic and must get you to agree with me, through coercion if need be. If we agree, then, I must be right, and therefore, I will be secure.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“Emphatic prosody is incredible for floor holding. Our brains like to be completely absorbed in an experience, and the lullaby-esque, lilting tones of the influencer accent scratch that itch while simultaneously enveloping us in a loop of engagement tactics.[2] Now that every other word is emphasized, we’re drawn in multiple times in each sentence. If your attention starts drifting, the added stress pulls you right back, making it harder to break away and easier to personally resonate with a video. Meanwhile, the vowel lengthening and overemphasis of the r sound are also textbook retention strategies because they keep us hanging on the elongated word. If you look at a children’s show like Sesame Street, you’ll see the exact same thing happening. The characters will frequently lengthen their vowels, not only to make it easier for kids to understand them, but also to continuously recapture their young audience’s attention. Hi, kiiids! Today we’re learning the alphabeeet! In this era of information overload, influencers are turning to the same floor-holding strategies we use to entertain toddlers.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
― Upton Sinclair

“It was so incomprehensible how a man could fail to see it. Here were all the opportunities of the country, the land and the buildings upon the land, the railroads, the mines, the factories, and the stores. All in the hands of a few private individuals, called capitalists, for whom the people were obliged to work, for wages. The whole balance of what the people produced went to heap up the fortunes of these capitalists. To heap, and heap again, and yet again. And that, in spite of the fact that they and everyone about them lived in unthinkable luxury. And was it not plain that if the people cut off the share of those who merely owned, the share of those who worked would be much greater? That was as plain as two and two makes four, and that was the whole of it. Absolutely, the whole of it. And yet, there were people who could not see it. Who would argue about everything else in the world. They would tell you that governments could not mange things as economically as private individuals. They would repeat and repeat that and think they were saying something. They could not see that economical management by masters, meant simply that they, the people, were worked harder, and ground closer, and paid less. They were wage owners and servants at the mercy of exploiters, whose one thought was to get as much out of them as possible.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

“So that's us: processed corn, walking.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Every generation inherits a worldview it struggles to see past. The Copernican revolution revealed that humans were not the center of the cosmos. The Darwinian revolution showed that humans were one species among many, evolved from common origins. We are amid another revolution in how we understand ourselves in relation to the rest of Nature--one challenging the remaining strongholds of anthropocentrism in Western science.”
― Christine Webb, The Arrogant Ape: And A New Way To See Humanity

“The divide between the psychic hinterlands and a setting we might call normal is permeable, a fact that I find both haunting and promising. It’s startling to realize how narrowly we avoid, or miss, living radically different lives.”
― Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

“To make a person look at himself when he’s in no condition to do so,” Ayd said, “can be a very dangerous thing to do.”
― Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”
― George Orwell

“As Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler put it, “The more you learn, the harder the lessons get.”
― Ellen Vora, The Anatomy of Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming the Body's Fear Response

“Words are such feeble things.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier