Tim Edison > Tim's Quotes

“The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“A time comes when you are all alone...when you’ve come to the end of everything that can happen to you. It’s the end of the world, even grief, your own grief, doesn’t answer you anymore, and you have to retrace your steps, to go back among people, it makes no difference who.”
― Louis Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit

“He had gone to several universities . . . and had found only curves and credits. He had become drunk on the idea of God and found only theology. He had risen several times on the subtle and powerful wings of lust, expectant of magnificence, achieving only discharge. A few times he had extended friendship with palpitating hope, only to find that no one quite knew what he had in mind. His solitude now was the result of his metabolism, that constant breathing in of joy and exhalation of sadness.”
― Edward Lewis Wallant, The Tenants of Moonbloom

“Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

“Here is the truth - actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.
- David Foster Wallace, from The Pale King”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Some of them screamed. Some of them wept. Some of them grinned like LSD was a blast. A case officer said John Stanton hatched the idea - lets flood Cuba with this shit before we invade. Langley co-signed the brainstorm. Langley embellished it: Let's induce mass hallucinations and stage the second coming of Christ!!!! Langley found some suicidal actors. Langley dolled them up to look like J.C. Langley had them set to pre-invade Cuba concurrent with the dope saturation. Peter howled. The case officer said, 'It's not funny.' A drug-zorched peon whipped out his wang and jacked off.”
― James Ellroy, American Tabloid

“There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“I couldn't buy the lice off a sick cat," the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”
― Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Despite its lack of size, the bee makes fine honey.”
― Einhard, Two Lives of Charlemagne

“There is no path to happiness: happiness is the path.”
― Buddha

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
― Gautama Buddha, The Teaching of Buddha

“There's people in hell who want ice water.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.”
― Robert Musil

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“Nothing is worse than to finish a good shit, then reach over and find the toilet paper container empty. Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his ass.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“In short, not only was it surprising to be greeted in person with such enthusiastic words, but it was doubly surprising when the person reciting these words displayed the same kind of disengagement as, say, the checkout clerk who utters the words 'Have a nice day' while her expression indicates that it's really a matter of total indifference to her whether you drop dead in the parking lot outside ten seconds from now.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Go mortals, sweat, pant, toil, range the lands and seas to pile up riches you cannot keep; glory that will not last. The life we lead is a sleep; whatever we do, dreams. Only death breaks the sleep and wakes us from dreaming. I wish I could have woken before this.”
― Petrarch

“Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.
It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's a novel, just a fictitious narrative. Littre says so and he's never wrong.
And besides, in the first place, anyone can do as much. You just have to close your eyes.
It's on the other side of life.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

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

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of 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

“I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet