Chandy John > Chandy John's Quotes

“I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.”
― John Cheever

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“You have my whole heart. You always did.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Every once in a very long while, Lord Tywin Lannister would actually threaten to smile; he never did, but the threat alone was terrible to behold.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell

“A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”
― Logan Pearsall Smith

“(On disco) I don't consider that a genre as much as a level of hell.”
― J.M. Hushour

“There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook.”
― David Benioff, When the Nines Roll Over and Other Stories

“There are still more days to travel in this life. And he knows that the man who makes the journey has been shaped by every day and every person along the way. Scars are just another kind of memory....Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend. ”
― Jim Harrison

“We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the stars.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“You’ll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you’ve been all along.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“There has never been nationhood without falsehood.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto

“A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion....Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners.”
― George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier: (Authorized Orwell Edition): A Mariner Books Classic

“If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread; I'm selling yeast.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“That which the fascists hate, above all else, is intelligence.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“Men shout to avoid listening to one another.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“Yet I wondered fancifully if he had seen more clearly than they did, had sensed the threat which my presence implied – the approaching disintegration of his society and the destruction of ‘his beliefs. Here especially it seemed that the evil that comes with sudden change would far outweigh the good. While I was with the Arabs I wished only to live as they lived and, now that I have left them, I would gladly think that nothing in their lives was altered by my coming. Regretfully, however, I realize that the maps I made helped others, with more material aims, to visit and corrupt a people whose spirit once lit the desert like a flame.”
― wilfred thesiger, Arabian Sands

“I was looking at Latin America and who was the richest guy in Venezuela? A brewer (the Mendoza family that owns Polar). The richest guy in Colombia? A brewer (the Santo Domingo group, the owner of Bavaria). The richest in Argentina? A brewer (the Bembergs, owners of Quilmes). These guys can’t all be geniuses...It’s the business that must be good.”
― Cristiane Correa, DREAM BIG: How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira - acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz

“a team of Japanese engineers had recently tried to build a 35-feet-high replica of the Great Pyramid (rather smaller than the original, which was 481 feet 5 inches in height). The team started off by limiting itself strictly to techniques proved by archaeology to have been in use during the Fourth Dynasty. However, construction of the replica under these limitations turned out to be impossible and, in due course, modern earth-moving, quarrying and lifting machines were brought to the site. Still no worthwhile progress was made. Ultimately, with some embarrassment, the project had to be abandoned.175”
― Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant

“Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.”
― J.D. Vance

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire