Peter Levens > Peter's Quotes

“A brand that feels human earns something no algorithm can replicate: trust”
― Warren Kornblum, Notes from the Brand Stand: Thoughts on Emotional Branding from Someone Who Has Fought for Consumer Attention and Won

“Closed curtains subdued the storm noises, as if the cloth and glass really were a protective shell for Holywell.”
― Susan Rowland, The Swan Lake Murders

“Genius is measured not by static volume but by kinetic vision.”
― Rich DiSilvio

“By the end of the four-year term, Americans hold a bifurcated view of Mrs. Trump. Many Republicans, especially women, revere her as elegant, graceful, beautiful and wronged by the press. A pastor in Missouri held up Melania as a wifely model to which other women should aspire — or risk losing their men. At the same time some southern preachers referred to then-Senator and presidential candidate Kamala Harris as Jezebel, the Bible’s most nefarious woman and archetype of female cunning. There could be no surer sign that the life stories of prominent women affect the lives of private women than when pastors hold them up as positive or negative role models.”
― Anne Michaud, Why They Stay: Sex Scandals, Deals, and Hidden Agendas of Eight Political Wives

“By six in the morning, she was baking with Emma. She was allowed to eat the burnt and the broken, and together they invented new muffins and pastries.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“Every night I dream a lot. Every day I live a little.”
― Max Nowaz, Get Rich or Get Lucky

“This world would be a pleasant place if people didn’t inhabit it.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“That wasn’t luck,” answered Alick with a shrug.”
― J L MARRAIN, The Gridd: Perils of the Lightholder

“Even the few serious crimes that did occur received no particular attention in the news. For well-bred people do not, after all, care to read about the social gaffes of others.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End

“Being a good person, or a better person, or whatever it is you're worried about and trying to fix? It shouldn't change who you are. It means you become more like yourself.”
― Stephanie Perkins, Lola and the Boy Next Door

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
― George Orwell

“Wild Things in Captivity

Wild things in captivity
while they keep their own wild purity
won't breed, they mope, they die.

All men are in captivity,
active with captive activity,
and the best won't breed, though they don't know why.

The great cage of our domesticity
kills sex in a man, the simplicity
of desire is distorted and twisted awry.

And so, with bitter perversity,
gritting against the great adversity,
they young ones copulate, hate it, and want to cry.

Sex is a state of grace.
In a cage it can't take place.
Break the cage then, start in and try.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir." he read, "You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next - and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine. Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines. You are pooped and demoralized, " read Dwayne. "Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions