Tony Diaz > Tony's Quotes

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#1

“Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer."

[Mark Twain, a Biography]”
― Mark Twain

tags: humor, prayer, profanity, relief, you-ll-completely-understand-why

344 likes

#2

“I’m a fool with a size one head/
I’ll change this heart of mine/
This time, this time”
― Richard Thompson

tags: song-lyrics

3 likes

#3

“History is an angel being blown backwards into the future”
― Laurie Anderson

tags: history, song-lyrics, walter-benjamin

18 likes

#4

“as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology

tags: discourse, fiction, ideology, imaginary, philosophy, real, symbolic

157 likes

#5

“Great News! If you quit being cunty the whole world will stop being against you!”
― Sarah Silverman

tags: advice, satire, twitter

39 likes

#6

“Let me fall out of the window/
With confetti in my hair”
― Tom Waits, Lyrics of Tom Waits: The Early Years, 1971-1983

tags: song-lyrics

67 likes

#7

“I danced along a colored wind/
Dangled from a rope of sand”
― Tom Waits, Lyrics of Tom Waits: The Early Years, 1971-1983

tags: song-lyrics

35 likes

#9

“Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.”
― William Kennedy, Roscoe

tags: 1920s, bon-mots, city, history, jazz-age-stories, machine-politics, politics, satire, sin, urban-life, vice

12 likes

#10

“Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.”
― William Kennedy, Roscoe

tags: 1920s, jazz-age-stories, prohibition

9 likes

#11

“Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.”
― Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

tags: borders, stories

17 likes

#12

“Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper.”
― William Kennedy, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

tags: 1920s, gambling, hustling, jazz-age-stories, pool

4 likes

#13

“You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

993 likes

#14

“Say the point of sex isn’t recreation of procreation or any of that stuff. Say it’s concentration. Say it’s supposed to focus your attention on the person you’re sleeping with--like biological hi-lighter. ... Otherwise, there’s just too many people in the world.”
― Don Roos

tags: lyle-lovett-actor, the-opposite-of-sex-screenplay

1 likes

#15

“My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.”
― Walker Percy, The Second Coming

tags: adolescence, you-re-not-the-boss-of-me

53 likes

#16

“The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.”
― Louis Simpson, People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949-1983

tags: american-exceptionalism, capitalism, freedom, frontier, individualism, liberalism, liberty, restlessness, romanticism, rootlessness, satire, self-reliance, walt-whitman

8 likes

#17

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.”
― George Bernard Shaw

tags: kill, laughter, misattributed-oscar-wilde, truth

3944 likes

#18

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

tags: healing, injuries, memory, past, reality, scars, time

2790 likes

#19

“I dont know what happens to country.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

tags: american-exceptionalism, borders, frontier, loss

8 likes

#20

“Beauty
Is the fume-track of necessity. This thought
Is therapeutic.

If, after several
Applications, you do not find
Relief, consult your family physician”
― Robert Penn Warren, The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren

tags: beauty, contingency, nature, necessity, poetry

7 likes

#21

“whoever approaches his goal dances”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

tags: hidden-meaning, rhetoric, spiritual

6 likes

#22

“Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

tags: american-exceptionalism, freedom, frontier, individualism, justice, liberalism, libertarianism, liberty, mercy, social-contract, solidarity, state-of-nature, the-west

53 likes

#23

“I need, therefore I imagine.”
― Carlos Fuentes

837 likes

#24

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

tags: empathy, thankful, understanding, understanding-others

2801 likes

#25

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

tags: fitzgerald

2283 likes

#26

“Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.”
― Tracy Letts, August: Osage County

tags: life

118 likes

#27

“At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right”
― Miguel de Unamuno

tags: lies, lying, reason, silence, truth

203 likes

#28

“The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

115 likes

#29

“Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationships between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships.”
― John Fowles The Magus

tags: compassion, gender-identity, men, war, women

17 likes

#30

“But when one takes Lorenzo Ivy’s words as a starting point, the whole history of the United States comes walking over the hill behind a line of people in chains.”
― Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

2 likes

#31

“Perhaps one unspoken reason why many have been so reluctant to apply the term “torture” to slavery is that even though they denied slavery’s economic dynamism, they knew that slavery on the cotton frontier made a lot of product. No one was willing, in other words, to admit that they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture.52 Yet we should call torture by its name. Historians of torture have defined the term as extreme torment that is part of a judicial or inquisitorial process. The key feature that distinguishes it from mere sadistic behavior is supposedly that torture aims to extract “truth.” But the scale and slate and lash did, in fact, continually extract a truth: the maximum poundage that a man, woman, or child could pick.”
― Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

7 likes

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