Malcolm Morrison > Malcolm's Quotes

“A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election.”
― Bill Vaughan

“Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

“There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.”
― James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

“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

“Never appeal to a man's better nature. He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Jessica has a forehead scar from the deep end of a pool. I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says not everything feels like something else.”
― Angie Sijun Lou

“To Never Have been born may be the greatest boon of all”
― Sophocles

“He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.”
― Wong Kar-Wai

“My name is Yon Yonson,
I work in Wisconsin,
I work in a lumbermill there.
The people I meet when I walk down the street,
They say, 'What's your name?
And I say,
‘My name is Yon Yonson,
I work in Wisconsin...”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children's Crusade: A Graphic Novel Adaptation

“Cecil Graham: What is a cynic?
Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Cecil Graham: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.”
― D. Elton Trueblood

“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
― Anonymous Greek Proverb

“The world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.”
― Alanis Obomsawin

“To understand all is to forgive all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
― Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin