Jeff Russo > Jeff's Quotes

“I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished.”
― Djuna Barnes

“People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.”
― Stephen Hawking

“Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
(They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.)”
― Horace, The Odes of Horace

“there are certain advantages in being cursed by all and sundry ... especially, it dispenses you with having to be nice to anybody ... there's nothing more emollient, stultifying, emasculating than wanting to be liked ... "not nice!" ... that does it, you're free! ...”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, North

“On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women.”
― H. L. Mencken

“People are suspicious of single men on vacation, after they get to a certain age: they assume that they're selfish, and probably a bit pervy. I can't say they're wrong.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Platform

“Every artist was first an amateur.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat...college,”
― Woody Allen

“The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions - none more so than the most capable.”
― Theodore Dreiser

“We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Solemnity is the shield of idiots”
― Charles-Louis De Secondat Montesquieu

“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Sometimes you feel like the only man in the city without group affiliation.”
― Jay McInerney

“We always wonder, when we see two people together, particularly when they're actually married, how these two people could have arrived at such a decision, such an act, so we tell ourselves that it's a matter of human nature, that it's very often a case of two people going together, getting together, only in order to kill themselves in time, sooner or later to kill themselves, after mutually tormenting each other for years for for decades, only to end up killing themselves anyway, people who get together even though they probably clearly perceive their future of shared torment, who join together, get married, in the teeth of all reason, who against all reason commit the natural crime of bringing children into the world who then proceed to be the unhappiest imaginable people, we have evidence of this situation wherever we look... People who get together and marry even though they can foresee their future together only as a lifelong shared martyrdom, suddenly all these people qua human beings, human beings qua ordinary people... enter into a union, into a marriage, into their annihilation, step by step down they go into the most horrible situation imaginable, annihilation by marriage, meaning annihilation mental, emotional, and physical, as we can see all around us, the whole world is full of instances confirming this... why, I may well ask myself, this senseless sealing of the bargain, we wonder about it because we have an instance of it before us, how did this instance come to be?”
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Everyone is isolated from everyone else. The concept of society is like a cushion to protect us from the knowledge of that isolation. A fiction that serves as an anesthetic.”
― Paul Bowles

“It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.”
― Abba Eban

“If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.”
― Lao Tzu

“If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.”
― Emma Goldman

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“I was never tempted by any political program... I don't want to hear about the fucking masses and I never did.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.”
― Natalie Clifford Barney

“That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads