Ben Simon > Ben's Quotes

“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”
― Harvey Pekar

“It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.”
― Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands

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

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
― Frank Zappa

“All I can be is me- whoever that is. ”
― Bob Dylan

“the tigers have found me
and I do not care.”
― Charles Bukowski

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

“If you were different from anybody in town, you had to get out. That's why everybody was so much alike. The way they talked, what they did, what they liked, what they hated. If somebody got to hate something and he was the right person, everybody had to hate it too, or people began to hate the ones who didn't hate it. They used to tell us in school to think for yourself, but you couldn't do that in the town. You had to think what your father thought all his life, and that was what everybody thought.”
― John Kennedy Toole, The Neon Bible

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC”
― kurt vonnegut

“people run from rain but
sit
in bathtubs full of
water.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

“all of us have a place in history. mine is clouds.”
― richard brautigan

“Laughter is the language of the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda

“My ambition is handicapped by laziness”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.”
― Richard Brautigan

“I'm in a constant process of thinking about things. ”
― Richard Brautigan

“He created his own Kool Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.”
― Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

“If you get hung up on everybody else's hang-ups, then the whole world's going to be nothing more than one huge gallows.”
― Richard Brautigan

“I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“He not busy being born is busy dying.”
― Bob Dylan

“Behind every beautiful thing, there's some kind of pain.”
― Bob Dylan

“Don't criticize what you can't understand.”
― Bob Dylan

“People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.”
― Bob Dylan