Stephen Gallup > Stephen's Quotes

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“I sensed then, and later formulated the conviction that wellness and potential are every child's birthright. And I'm quite sure that society is served when children have it.”
― Stephen Gallup, What About the Boy?

“The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.”
― Alfred Kazin

“He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.”
― Arthur Miller

“I knew that we'd never get there. I knew this, in the same way I knew Tati would never be a teacher, and that Benny would be the end of me. Life's about confirming what we already know. About making sure. ”
― Nami Mun, Miles from Nowhere

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“A lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to.”
― Banksy, Wall and Piece

“Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist-a master-and that is what Auguste Rodin was-can look at an old woman, protray her exactly as she is...and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be...and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart...no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired-but it does to them.”
― Robert Heinlein

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
― Mark Twain

“Large portraits of Mao on wooden boards several feet high stood at main street corners. Painted to make the old man look extremely youthful, healthy, and fat (a sign of well-being in China), these pictures provided a mocking contrast to the thin, pale-faced pedestrians walking listlessly below them.”
― Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation.”
― Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D., My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

“Sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance—the tyranny of contingency—is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.”
― Philip Roth

“Life is defined mostly by how you handle failure.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“When you jump off a cliff, falling can look a whole lot like flying, for a while anyway.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“People talk about grief as emptiness, but it's not empty. It's full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you'd have.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“My mom once told me that's the secret of life. We all think we're frauds. Everybody's winging it.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer.”
― Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book

“the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.”
― Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

“To fail spectacularly is a loser's paradise.”
― Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

“Whoever controls the supply of metaphor controls fiction!
. . . Metaphor should be controlled. A glut on the market would make fiction overtly highbrow, painfully ambiguous, and potentially unreadable.”
― Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

“I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it. Feel the rush of sweetness: we make love.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.”
― Colum McCann, Zoli

“I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza with roommates knows that Communism cannot ever work. If Lenin and Marx had just shared an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared and put to productive use making sneakers and office furniture.”
― Daniel Suarez, Daemon

“Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.”
― Paul Auster

“We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.”
― Paul Auster

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