Raymond > Raymond's Quotes

“Though opposition is a hopeless task, acquiescence would be worse.”
― Thomas M. Disch, Camp Concentration

“The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died forever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague.”
― J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes

“You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.”
― Paul Virilio

“He never looks at comics these days, even though they’ve become fashionable to the point where adults are allowed to read them without fear of ridicule. Ironically, in David’s view, this makes them a lot more ridiculous than when they were intended as a perfectly legitimate and often beautifully crafted means of entertaining kids. At age thirteen, David’s idea of heaven was somewhere that comics were acclaimed and readily available, perhaps with dozens of big budget movies featuring his favourite obscure costumed characters. Now that he’s in his fifties and his paradise is all around him he finds it depressing. Concepts and ideas meant for the children of some forty years ago: is that the best that the twenty-first century has got to offer? When all this extraordinary stuff is happening everywhere, are Stan Lee’s post-war fantasies of white neurotic middle-class American empowerment really the most adequate response?”
― Alan Moore, Jerusalem

“Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.”
― Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza

“He acted as if he could detect in her face nothing but its external beauties of form and texture. Whereas, of course, flesh is never wholly opaque; the soul shows through the walls of its receptacle.”
― Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza

“The math was irrefutable: The one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“People simply can’t accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just comes along for the ride.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.”
― Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude

“It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.”
― Philip K. Dick

“we see in essence not with two eyes but with three: with the two eyes of the body and with the eye of the mind that is behind them. And it is in this eye of the mind in which the cultural-historical progressive development of the color sense takes place.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God
who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If God is
seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that
relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect, he becomes a
being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all‐knowing tyrant is not so
different from earthly dictators who make everything and
everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism
that rejects such a God is amply justified.”
― Karen Armstrong

“If you’re going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats.”
― Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

“As my cat would say, all hours are good for sleeping.”
― José Saramago, Seeing

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Terror made me cruel . . .”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”
― Eric Schmidt

“When you’re a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you’re left with is a stunned bitterness at the realisation that you’re just the same as everybody else.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Only Forward

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“Bad luck relies on absolutely perfect timing.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“One should see the world, and see himself, as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed, the scale is tipped to the good — he and the world are saved. When he does one evil deed, the scale is tipped to the bad — he and the world are destroyed.’” “Interesting. Who said that, your grandmother?” “Maimonides. The great Jewish scholastic.” “I didn’t know you read Jewish philosophers.” “It is said, ‘You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.’” “And who said that?” “Also Maimonides.”
― Gregory Maguire, Egg & Spoon

“Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare--the first requisite of a practitioner.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“You can drag my body to school but my spirit refuses to go.”
― Bill Watterson, The Essential Calvin and Hobbes

“Think of egg and spoon. If there is an egg, well, fine. You eat. Unless you use your spoon to hold the egg out of my reach. Does being in possession of a spoon give you more right to the egg?”
― Gregory Maguire, Egg & Spoon

“I know only one thing. when i sleep, i know no fear, no, trouble no bliss. blessing on him who invented sleep. the common coin that purchases all things, the balance that levels shepherd and king, fool and wise man. there is only one bad thing about sound sleep. they say it closely resembles death.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris