Michael Quinn > Michael's Quotes

“Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone.
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.”
― Adam Lindsay Gordon

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

“What is a rebel? A man who says no.”
― Albert Camus

“Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth”
― Albert Camus

“What do you most value in your friends?
Their continued existence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Give her a day, and then in return Momma gives you the other 364.”
― Will Rogers

“Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“You don't have to be stupid to be a Christian, ... but it probably helps.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.”
― W.B. Yeats

“There is another world, but it is in this one.”
― William Butler Yeats

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
"Pooh!" he whispered.
"Yes, Piglet?"
"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you.”
― A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

“I'm in love with you," he said quietly.

"Augustus," I said.

"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“If in life we are surrounded by death, then in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein and Cyril Barrett

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
― Primo Levi

“I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.”
― Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

“... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once...”
― Primo Levi

“One of them declared: 'Doing this work, one either goes crazy the first day or gets accustomed to it.' Another, though: 'Certainly I could have killed myself or got myself killed; but I wanted to survive, to avenge myself and bear witness. You mustn't think that we are monsters; we are the same as you, only much more unhappy.”
― Primo Levi

“The future of humanity is uncertain, even in
the most prosperous countries, and the quality
of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what
is being discovered about the infinitely large
and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this
end of the century and millennium. What a very
few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical
world will perhaps cause this period not to be
judged as a pure return of barbarism.”
― Primo Levi

“She had asked the older women: "What is that fire?" And they had replied: "It is we who are burning.”
― Primo Levi

“To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

“Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima'—the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd.

The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: “anima”—the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir