Don > Don's Quotes

“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
― Rachel Carson

“My one fear is that tomorrow I may die without having come to know myself”
― Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“I wondered about going down to the creek, but I had no reason to suppose that the creek would even be there, since I never visited it on Tuesday mornings.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“Most lead lives at worst so painful, at best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principle appetites of the soul.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“Why, is it such a bad thing to die?”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.”
― Michael Pollan

“But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.

Was that so depressing?

Who knows? Maybe that was 'despair.' What Turgenev called 'disillusionment.' Or Dostoyevsky, 'hell.' Or Somerset Maugham, 'reality.' Whatever the label, I figured it was me.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I fear that on my last day, on my deathbed, that is when the meaning of things will enter the room and kiss my forehead and whisper into my ear what it was I should have done with my life, and how I should've conducted myself. Hell isn't a fire pit but a museum of regrets.”
― Exurb1a, The Fifth Science

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they’ll never sit in.”
― Exurb1a, The Fifth Science

“here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her? But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured.At least by the person who's waiting.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“Much like a food, a psychoactive drug is not a thing — without a human brain, it is inert — so much as it is a relationship; it takes both a molecule and a mind to make anything happen.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is - infinite.”
― William Blake

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I'm not so weird to me.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get in the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“You may say that it was the book, but it’s how you read a book that is most valuable, rather than any power it might have itself.”
― Michiko Aoyama, What You Are Looking for Is in the Library

“I’m not an animal anymore, sister,” she said, first scanning the empty ward as if about to disclose a momentous secret. “I don’t need to eat, not now. I can live without it. All I need is sunlight.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“We can continue pushing our earth out of balance, with greenhouse gases accelerating each year, or we can regain balance by acknowledging that if we harm one species, one forest, one lake, this ripples through the entire complex web. Mistreatment of one species is mistreatment of all.

The rest of the planet has been waiting patiently for us to figure that out. Making this transformation requires that humans recommect with nature -- the forests, the prairie, the oceans -- instead of treating everything and everyone as objects for exploitation.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“You don’t have to die in the next year if you die this year.”
― Shakespeare William

“I wasn’t particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don’t have to die the next. All quite simple, if you want to look at it that way. Life’s no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe’s my own to fool with. Hence I can live with it. But after I’m dead, can’t I just lie in peace? Those Egyptian pharoahs had a point, wanting to shut themselves up inside pyramids.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“The White Man goes into his church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his tipi and talks with Jesus.”
― Quanah Parker

“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. ”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“If alcohol fuels our Dionysian tendencies, caffeine nurtures the Apollonian.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants