Rob Smith > Rob's Quotes

“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being--neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul - but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them - but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us - we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.”
― Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices First Series

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Some may never live, but the crazy never die.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.”
― Alan Moore

“I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
― Malcolm X

“Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

“The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.”
― Philip K. Dick

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“And who understands? Not me, because if I did I would forgive it all.”
― John Donne

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
― Richard Dawkins

“Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.”
― William S. Burroughs

“In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.”
― William Burroughs

“If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.”
― Emma Goldman

“Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“As all partings foreshadow the great final one, - so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets godawful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
― H. L. Mencken

“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast