Jack > Jack's Quotes

“.. or a saint who had spent all his years preparing for his grand entry into heaven, only to discover on his deathbed that heaven was not some blue expanse full of angelic string quartets and opalescent clouds, but an eternity granted for reliving one's happiest moments, and that he had none to remember;”
― Olga Grushin

“Rational self-interest is always what morality boils down to.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“We must believe that he will come but never believe that he is come. There is no Messiah but an uncome Messiah.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

“If the suffering of children goes to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Was and will make me ill, I take a gramme and only am. (Lenina)”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Anyway, that's all art school is. A big clusterfuck for rich poseurs. Who the fuck needs it? But it's a system, right? You have to go to the art schools to get into the galleries, to learn how to talk that bullshit. That's what they're learning, to talk bullshit.

The Serialist
David Gordon”
― David Gordon, The Serialist

“For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever- including the jug- there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“What do we mean - it is a common term of praise - when we say that a book is "original"? Not, usually, that the writer has invented something without precedent, but that she has made us "perceive" what we already, in a conceptual sense, "know", by deviating from the conventional, habitual ways of representing reality. Defamiliarization, in short, is another word for "originality". I shall have recourse to it again in these glances at the art of fiction.”
― David Lodge, The Art of Fiction

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“I used to believe, when I was 'just' a reader, that writers, because they wrote books where truth was found, because they described the world, because they saw into the human heart, because they grasped both the particular and the general and were able to re-create both in free yet structured forms, because they understood, must therefore be more sensitive- also less vain, less selfish- than other people. Then I became a writer, and started meeting other writers, and studied them, and concluded that the only difference between them and other people, the only, single way in which they were better, was that they were better writers. They might indeed be sensitive, perceptive, wise, generalizing and particularizing- but only at their desks and in their books. When they venture out into the world, they regularly behave as if they have left all their comprehension of human behaviour stuck in their typescripts. It's not just writers either. How wise are philosophers in their private lives?”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
”
― Julian Barnes

“That is the moment I begin to despise the idea of fame. What does it do for the bearer of the laurel? Who cares if your name is in the paper? Who cares if you are mentioned as one of the top-ten cyclists, boxers, batters, painters, poets, artists, fly fishermen in the world? Who cares if your name is written in history books? When you have died you can't read those history books. When you have died the small trace you have left behind, even if you win a Tony, an Emmy, an Oscar, an election, will lose its vibrancy, fade into an outline. Oh yes, him, I heard of him, I knew someone who read him once. What difference does it make to the corpse if his books are in libraries or not in libraries? Who cares if his plays are revived on the summer-stock circuit for one hundred years? Isn't the simplest touch of a child's arm on the face more important, isn't the good meal, the brush against a thigh, a hand held during a movie, a swim in the sea, aren't those things of equal importance as the sands of time come rushing down on our heads burying ambition and love, good and evil, breath, blood, brains, waste, memory, alike in oblivion?”
― Anne Roiphe