antediluvian > antediluvian 's Quotes

“Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only God’s echoes and God is Narcissus.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Wilderness. The word itself is music.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“A giant thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Late in August the lure of the mountains becomes irresistible. Seared by the everlasting sunfire, I want to see running water again, embrace a pine tree, cut my initials in the bark of an aspen, get bit by a mosquito, see a mountain bluebird, find a big blue columbine, get lost in the firs, hike above timberline, sunbathe on snow and eat some ice, climb the rocks and stand in the wind at the top of the world on the peak of Tukuhnikivats.”
― edward abbey, Desert Solitaire

“When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life," the doctor said. "Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness." He sipped at his bourbon and ice. "Soon there will be no place to go. Then the madness becomes universal." Another thought. "And the universe goes mad.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“I remembered what it was like to walk a gauntlet of strangers who stare—their eyes angry, confused, intrigued. Woman or man: they are outraged that I confuse them. The punishment will follow. The only recognition I can find in their eyes is that I am “other.” I am different. I will always be different. I will never be able to nestle my skin against the comfort of sameness.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“But very quickly I discovered that passing didn't just mean slipping below the surface, it meant being buried alive. I was still me on the inside, trapped in there with all my wounds and fears. But I was no longer me on the outside.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“That’s when I began passing as a man. Strange to be exiled from your own sex to borders that will never be home.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“This transformation of competition into monopoly is one of the most important—if not the most important—phenomena of modern capitalist economy,”
― Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition

“Translated into ordinary human language this means that the development of capitalism has arrived at a stage when, although commodity production still “reigns” and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the “geniuses” of financial manipulation.”
― Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition

“Deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

“Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact--in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself--of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were. Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed using taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PC progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as "low-income" or "economically disadvantaged" or "pre-prosperous" rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates. [...] In other words, PCE acts as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Those who exclaim that “animals are not people” tend to forget that, while true, it is equally true that people are animals. To minimize the complexity of animal behavior without doing the same for human behavior erects an artificial barrier.”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“When we see a disciplined society, there is often a social hierarchy behind it. This hierarchy, which determines who can eat or mate first, is ultimately rooted in violence.”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“Perhaps religion is like a ship that has carried us across the ocean, having allowed us to develop huge societies with a well-functioning morality. Now that we are spotting land, some of us are ready to disembark”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Sublime is something you choke on after a shot of tequila.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“The greatest of love letters are always coded for the one and not the many.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“I must read.
I must read.
I must read.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“There is no such thing as the last straw. There is only hay.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Quick note here: if this crush-slash-swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach; if you’ve never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you’ve got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small for anyone, let alone you, to climb into.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves