Taube > Taube's Quotes

“Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one’s end….Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past. ”
― J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

“Puns are the highest form of literature.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters

“Simon Stimson: "...That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another.”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“the mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism, as it stands today, characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.”
― Hubert H. Humphrey

“so full of himself he could have shit limbs.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“One of the paradoxes of our time is that the War on Terror has served mainly to reinforce a collective belief that maintaining the right amount of fear and suspicion will earn one safety. Fear is promoted by the government as a kind of policy. Fear is accepted, even among the best-educated people in this country, even among the professors with whom I work, as a kind of intelligence. And inspiring fear in others is often seen as neighborly and kindly, instead of being regarded as what my cousin recognized it for—a violence.”
― Eula Biss, Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays

“You West Virginia girls are one tough breed," he said.
You got that right," I told him.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“I don’t understand this notion of ethnic pride. “Proud to be Irish,” “Puerto Rican pride,” “Black pride.” It seems to me that pride should be reserved for accomplishments; things you attain or achieve, not things that happen to you by chance. Being Irish isn’t a skill; it’s genetic. You wouldn’t say, “I’m proud to have brown hair,” or “I’m proud to be short and stocky.” So why the fuck should you say you’re proud to be Irish? I’m Irish, but I’m not particularly proud of it. Just glad! Goddamn glad to be Irish!”
― George Carlin, Napalm & Silly Putty

“There comes a time in every Salome's life when she should no longer be dropping the last veil.”
― Harvey Fierstein, La Cage Aux Folles Sheet Music

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.”
― Anne Lamott

“After all," Anne had said to Marilla once, "I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

“I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.”
― Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

“We do not need guns and bombs to bring peace, we need love and compassion.”
― Mother Teresa, The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living

“In the twentieth century, Buddhism and Taoism gained many adherents in Europe who banged gongs and breathed through their diaphragm and talked about yin and yang and wrote mystical books and said that the world was full of mysteries, but only apparently so, because in reality everything was harmonious. And when someone experienced a mystery, they wrote a book about it because the media era had arrived and everyone wanted to write a book.”
― Patrik Ouředník, Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century

“Swords can win territories but not hearts, forces can bend heads but not minds.”
― Mirza Tahir Ahmad

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“Birthdays are ghost bounty hunters that track you down to ask, "Que pasa, baby?”
― Jim Harrison

“And when Quimet saw the doves flying above our roof and only above our roof, his face stopped looking so yellow and he said everything was okay. When the doves got sick of flying they started to come down, first one and then another. They went back in the dovecote like old ladies going to mass, taking little steps and jerking their heads like wind-up toys.”
― Mercè Rodoreda, The Time of the Doves

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
― Edgar Mitchell

“It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.”
― Stephen Colbert

“Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“The essential difference between the culture of the past and the entertainment of today is that the products of the former sought to transcend mere present time, to endure, to stay alive for future generations, while the products of the latter are made to be consumed instantly and disappear, like cake or popcorn.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society

“Light literature, along with light cinema and light art, give the reader and the viewer the comfortable impression that they are cultured, revolutionary, modern and in the vanguard without having to make the slightest intellectual effort. Culture that purports to be avant-garde and iconoclastic instead offers conformity in its worst forms: smugness and self-satisfaction.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society