John Yunker > John's Quotes

“I trust everyone. I just don’t trust the devil inside them.”
― Troy Kennedy Martin

“We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Foe

“We grieve only for what we know.”
― Aldo Leopold

“For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans.
Everywhere else is Cleveland.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Viresque Acquirit Eundo.(She gathers strength as she goes.)”
― Virgil, from Aeneid

“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“If you talk to the animals they will talk with you
and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them
you will not know them, and what you do not know
you will fear. What one fears one destroys.”
― Dan George

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”
― Nicholas Klein

“Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.”
― August Strindberg, A Dream Play

“And alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn. For his mourners will all be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

“Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“There is no better designer than nature.”
― Alexander McQueen

“If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.”
― John McPhee

“Whenever people say, 'We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, 'We must be realistic,' they mean they are going to make money out of it.”
― Brigid Brophy

“In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition.”
― Brigid Brophy, Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without

“Sentimentalist” is the abuse with which people counter the accusation that they are cruel, thereby implying that to be sentimental is worse than to be cruel, which it isn’t.”
― Brigid Brophy

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
― Albert Camus

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
― Georg Hegel

“All men hate the wretched.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.”
― Peter Singer

“What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.”
― Peter Singer

“It takes twenty-one pounds of protein fed to a calf to produce a single pound of animal protein for humans. We get back less than 5 percent of what we put in.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party and I attended with my real face”
― Franz Kafka

“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger.”
― Helen Garner, The Spare Room