Josh Kay > Josh's Quotes

“Keep it bouncing," he'd told her once, "that's all the secret, keep it bouncing.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages--they haven't ended yet.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Deadeye Dick

“That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Deadeye Dick

“To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Deadeye Dick

“My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me.”
― محمد بن إدريس الشافعي

“-Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it's exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos...”
― William Gaddis, J R

“In every age everybody knows that up to his own time, progressive improvement has been taking place; nobody seems to reckon on any improvement in the next generation. We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who say society has reached a turning point – that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us and with just as much apparent reason. ... On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”
― Thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical, historical and miscellaneous essays Volume 1

“Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.”
― Stephen Vincent Benét

“Don't fear big. Fear mediocrity. Fear waste. Fear the lack of living to your fullest. When we fear big, we either consciously or subconsciously work against it. We either run toward lesser outcomes and opportunities or we simply run away from the big ones. If courage isn't the absence of fear, but moving past it, then thinking big isn't the absence of doubts, but moving past them. Only living big will let you experience your true life and work potential.”
― Gary Keller, The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

“I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Don't Panic.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I'd far rather be happy than right any day.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“Reality is frequently inaccurate.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood”
― Oscar Wilde

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”
― Colette

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
― Socrates

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov