Shawn > Shawn's Quotes

“A man will suffer misery to get to the bottom of truth, but he will not suffer boredom.”
― Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“Nobody loves no one.”
― Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“Going against tended to end more rightly, more justly, than going with. People were wrong. Rules, most of the time, favored not what was right, but what was convenient or preferable to those in charge.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.”
― William Faulkner

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Empire Star

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Pouring out liquor is like burning books.”
― William Faulkner

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
― William Faulkner

“War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.”
― William Faulkner

“I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.”
― William Faulkner

“I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.”
― William Faulkner

“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

“All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“There was something quite correct and right about a man so sad he made bad decisions.”
― Leone Ross, Popisho

“Don’t trust anyone who keep telling you what’s wrong with you,”
― Leone Ross, Popisho

“I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Hope
Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering 'it will be happier'...”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson