Will Towne > Will's Quotes

“To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.”
― John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“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

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“A book is as private and consensual as sex.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. We develop all those long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways, without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with shite, things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn’t all totally pointless.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”
― Stephen Fry

“There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.”
― William S. Burroughs

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I don't care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.”
― William S. Burroughs

“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”
― Frank Zappa

“You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.”
― Woody Allen

“We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck them.”
― John Waters

“Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.”
― Voltaire

“Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine.”
― Lord Byron

“Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.”
― Alfred Tennyson

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
― Voltaire

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”
― Mark Twain

“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984