Brendan Clancy > Brendan's Quotes

“One eye sees, the other feels.”
― Paul Klee

“To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
― Lao Tzu

“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”
― Margaret Atwood

“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“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

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

“I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

“Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.”
― Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”
― H.G. Wells, The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman

“Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees

“and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

All of them?

Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.”
― Margaret Atwood

“As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.”
― Marcel Duchamp

“It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.”
― Ezra Pound

“It is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost”
― Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux

“Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.”
― Thomas Merton

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
― Dante Alighieri

“Nature is the art of God.”
― Dante Alighieri

“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.”
― Jasper Johns

“It's quite uncanny what one sets in motion by being oneself.”
― William Kennedy, The Flaming Corsage

“And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night