Paul > Paul's Quotes

“No one wants to admit that they suffer from a mental illness, because of the stigma,” I said. “Both of us suffer from major depression. He knows that I’ve been through a lot of the same things that he’s going through now.”
― Patrick J. Kennedy, A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction

“Finally, the Steelers were backed up near their own goal line when Brister called for a draw play. He handed off to Hoge, who found himself staring into a human wall. It consisted not only of Seth Joyner but also of Jerome Brown, a defensive tackle, and Reggie White, one of the most feared defensive ends in the history of the NFL. Hoge thought: I’m gonna fuck them up. I’m gonna hit them as hard as they’ve ever been hit in their life. He plunged headfirst into the wall. “When I hit, I felt like my internal organs just went out my ass,” he said. “It was like poof!”
― Mark Fainaru-Wada, League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth

“When sociobiologists start shitting in their backyards with dinner guests in the vicinity, maybe their arguments about innateness over culture will start seeming more persuasive. ”
― Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

“So exiled have even basic questions of freedom become from the political vocabulary that they sound musty and ridiculous, and vulnerable to the ultimate badge of shame-'That's so 60's!'-the entire decade having been mocked so effectively that social protest seems outlandish and 'so last century,' just another style excess like love beads and Nehru jackets. No, rebellion won't pose a problem for this social order.”
― Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“In neoliberal victim theory, the rather uncompassionate conception of victimization as self-made – the idea that winners win and losers lose because they have simply chosen to do so – fairly obviously evacuates sociological explanation of social suffering, directly subverting progressive political efforts to make victimization through poverty, inequality, discrimination and violence visible as collective and socio-economically embedded in an array of intersecting engines of social hierarchy and difference.”
― Rebecca Stringer, Knowing Victims

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Reader's Bill of Rights

1. The right to not read

2. The right to skip pages

3. The right to not finish

4. The right to reread

5. The right to read anything

6. The right to escapism

7. The right to read anywhere

8. The right to browse

9. The right to read out loud

10. The right to not defend your tastes”
― Daniel Pennac

“Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.”
― André Gide

“Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.”
― Andre Gide

“Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.”
― Lao-Tzu

“If you propose to speak always ask yourself, is it true, is it necessary, is it kind.”
― Rev. James Haldane Stewart

“Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
― Mark Twain

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”
― Mark Twain

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
― Mark Twain

“Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.”
― Mark Twain

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”
― Mark Twain

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Lie beside me. Let me see the division of your pores. Let me see the web of scars made by your family's claws and you their furniture. Let me see the wounds that they denied. The battle ground of family life that has been your body. Let me see the bruised red lines that signal their encampment. Let me see the routed place where they are gone. Lie beside me and let the seeing be healing. No need to hide. No need for either darkness or light. Let me see you as you are.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“I put the words into a flask and flung them out to sea. Flung them far out from me, made through myself, but not myself. Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

The world is packed tight with fools.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“The dead are on their way to work, grey limbs rubbing together in an open grave, stack on stack in the metal containers of car, tube and train. The grisly carriages are painted bright colors, guillotine colors of tumbril and blade, execution-bright. Each man and woman goes to their particular scaffold, kneels, and is killed day after day. Each collects their severed head and catches the train home. Some say that they enjoy their work.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“The poor are used to stifling any expression of their despair, because they must get on with life, with work, with the demands made of them day after day, hour after hour.”
― Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets

“Read a verse of Homer and you can walk the walls of Troy alongside Hector; fall into a paragraph by Fitzgerald and your Now entangles with Gatsby’s Now; open a 1953 book by Ray Bradbury and go hunting T. rexes. Ursula Le Guin said: “Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time,” and she’s right, of course. The shelves of every library in the world brim with time machines. Step into one, and off you go.”
― Anthony Doerr, author of “All the Light We Cannot See”

“To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men.”
― Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“Quiet people have the loudest minds.”
― Stephen Hawking

“If it weren't for the coffee, I'd have no identifiable personality whatsoever.”
― David Letterman