Searnold > Searnold's Quotes

“They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.

'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.”
― John Champlin Gardner, Grendel

“I couldn't go on, too conscious all at once of my whispering, my eternal posturing, always transforming the world with words--changing nothing.”
― John Champlin Gardner Jr., Grendel

“CHORUS:
You that live in my ancestral Thebes, behold this Oedipus,- him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful; not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot- see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him!
Look upon that last day always. Count no mortal happy till he has passed the final limit of his life secure from pain.”
― Sophocles, The Complete Greek Tragedies

“It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty... Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference- a powerful, implacable beauty- and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Labels such as ‘‘the culture wars,’’ ‘‘the science wars,’’ or ‘‘the Freud wars’’ are now widely used to refer to some of the disagreements that
plague contemporary intellectual life ... But I would like to register a gentle protest. Metaphors influence the mind in many unnoticed ways. The willingness to describe fierce disagreement in terms of the metaphors of war makes the very existence of real wars seem more natural, more inevitable,
more a part of the human condition. It also betrays us into an insensibility toward the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars really are.”
― Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?

“To Ishmael, the whale's indefinite whiteness' shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation. [It's] a color-less, all-color of atheism from which we shrink.”
― Herman Melville

“There is no greater cruelty than a genius stumbling over something idiotic.”
― Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Pledge

“Reality can be only partially attacked by logic.”
― Friedrich Dürrenmatt

“A story is not finished, until it has taken the worst turn”
― Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Physicists

“If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“That’s what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and the despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“What is man? Dust turned to hope.”
― Elie Wiesel, The Gates of the Forest

“Perhaps the essence of tradition, it's ultimate justification, is to comfort, to bring a small measure of dreams, a brief instance of illusion, to a moment when every real avenue of escape is cut off, when there is no longer any recourse.”
― Saul Friedländer, When Memory Comes

“Life is much shorter than I imagined it to be.”
― Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky

“What do I have in common with the Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself.”
― Franz Kafka

“Every cultivated man is a theologian, and faith is not a requisite.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain

“On the sixth day God saw He couldn't do it all, so He created ENGINEERS”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Falling Free

“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.”
― Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things: De rerum natura

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire

“America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians... the evil was there... waiting.”
― William S. Burroughs

“I find it easier to believe in God than to believe Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.”
― William F. Buckley

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I

“Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”
― Woody Allen

“We are all born mad. Some remain so.”
― Samuel Beckett

“People who know what kind of new world they want to create through revolution are trouble enough; those who only know what they want to destroy are a curse.”
― Mark Lilla

“Doubt is the heart of the matter. Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. You're certain that you possess the Truth -- inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T -- and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism.”
― Graham Greene