Ian "Marvin" Graye > Ian's Quotes

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“You’ve got to sing like you don’t need the money,
Love like you’ll never get hurt.
You’ve got to dance like nobody’s watchin’.”
― Richard Leigh, Come from the Heart Sheet Music

“Anyway—because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of night or day.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

“Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
― Roberto Bolano

“all success cloaks a surrender”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
― Anthony G. Oettinger

“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Men always makes gods in their own image.”
― Xenophanes

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”
― Wole Soyinka

“In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.”
― Rollo May

“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.”
― Rollo May

“They showed considerable anxiety because they were in the process of loving beauty.”
― Rollo May

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?”
― Rollo May