Ian > Ian's Quotes

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
― Roberto Bolano

“There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.”
― Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

“The truth is not always useful, not always good. It’s like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, elemental forces, the truth needs to be channeled, managed, controlled and intelligently, morally allocated.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.”
― Iain M. Banks, Excession

“Don't you have a religion?" Dorolow asked Horza.

"Yes," he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. "My survival."

"So... your religion dies with you. How sad," Dorolow said, looking back from Horza to the screen. The Changer let the remark pass.”
― Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas

“it hung above the livid, bruised land like an admonition”
― Iain M. Banks, Matter

“It is especially important to remember that the ownership of humans is possible too; not in terms of actual slavery, which they are proud to have abolished, but in the sense that, according to which sex and class one belongs to, one may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one's labour or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In the case of males, they give themselves most totally when they become soldiers; the personnel in their armed forces are like slaves, with little personal freedom, and under threat of death if they disobey. Females sell their bodies, usually, entering into the legal contract of "marriage" to Intermediates, who then pay them for their sexual favours by-”
― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

“One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata

“How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors—activities packed with flow triggers—because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like “career” or “children”?”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“When Felix walked off the project,” says Walshe, “it was the darkest moment in his life. But a phobia—that’s deeply rooted fear. To face that, to come back, to trust strangers with his life, to put himself back into position to do something no one else had ever conceived of? I’ve seen plenty of astounding feats of human performance, but emotionally, Felix’s journey is the farthest I’ve ever seen an athlete come.”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.”
― Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

“My brother. Are you ready?” “Yes,” the other replied. “You realize I’m going to use your computer to hack pm.gov.tn?” “OK,” the main replied. “Tell me what to”
― Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

“All the doors were open, all the faces were frightened; one felt that Death was there.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“Anonymous was like any other modern-day movement that had become fragmented by the user-generated, crowd-sourced nature of a web-enabled society.”
― Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

“Opinions on stuff like that are so fluid,” said William, “maybe because we’re young and impressionable. Maybe we’re just honest when we change our mind.”
― Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

“The FBI later denied to the New York Times that they “let [the Stratfor] attack happen for the purpose of collecting more evidence,” going on to claim the hackers were already knee-deep in Stratfor’s confidential files on December 6. By then, they added, it was “too late” to stop the attack from happening. Court documents, however, show that the hackers did not access the Stratfor e-mails until around December 14. On December 6, Sup_g was not exactly “knee-deep” in Stratfor files: he had simply found encrypted credit card data that he thought he could crack.”
― Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

“Leiderman, his lawyer, scrambled to get Royal a lesser sentence, perhaps some kind of house arrest so he could continue working and going to school. He was frustrated with the law on this matter. “We’re over-criminalizing childish mischief,” he said. “A twelve-year-old with moderate knowledge of computers could have signed up for a VPN and used this SQL tool Havij and, with the instructions he had, done this attack. [Royal] has lived an exemplary life, and gets what he did. We don’t need to be locking people like that up.”
― Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”
― H. P. Lovecraft

“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”
― Bruce Lee

“Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one”
― Bruce Lee

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
― Bruce Lee

“Once introduced, however, the fighting épée was seen to have merits well beyond its uses in formal dueling; its practitioners had to develop the duelist’s mentality: hit without being hit.”
― Richard Cohen, By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions

“The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years.”
― Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

“The symbolism of the action has been replaced by the reality of the touch.”
― Richard Cohen, By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions

“He either fears his fate too much / Or his deserts are small / That puts it not unto the touch / To win or lose it all.”
― Richard Cohen, By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions

“The difference between the genius of the British constitution, which protects and governs North America, and that of the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies, cannot, perhaps, be better illustrated than by the different state of those countries.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“it appears evidently from experience, that man is, of all sorts of luggage, the most difficult to be transported.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations