Mark Danielson > Mark's Quotes

“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The best way to know someone is to have a conversation with them.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“It is early in November of 1942 and a simply unbelievable amount of shit is going on, all at once, everywhere.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan’s speech.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think - this will maybe sound weird - it's like the corporate world's full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I've had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia's no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts."

"I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite --"

"I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that."

"You don't think he likes his job, then."

"Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realises it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“he had an idea—too sentimental to speak aloud and he knew none of his divorced friends would ever own up to it—that something must linger, a half-life of marriage, some sense memory of love even if obviously not the thing itself. He thought these people must mean something to one another, even if they didn’t like one another anymore.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“This is a terrible place to die in.
Where's a good one?”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“What joins men together is not the sharing of bread but sharing of enemies.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“When it stops, you'll know you've heard it all your life.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West