ExtraGravy > ExtraGravy's Quotes

“Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. He is wrong; man is a thinking erratum. Each period in life is a new edition that corrects the preceding one and that in turn will be corrected by the next, until publication of the definitive edition, which the publisher donates to the worms.”
― Machado de Assis, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

“The apparent determinism of the macroscopic world is due only to the fact that the microscopic randomness cancels out on average, leaving only fluctuations too minute for us to perceive in everyday life.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“I have always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to town a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

“Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.”
― J.A. Baker

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“To the ancient Greeks, myths were the same as history—they believed that all of the fantastical events in them had really happened once upon a time. The myths were their way of making sense of the past, even as far back as how the world was created.”
― Jean Menzies, Greek Myths: Meet the Heroes and Heroines, Monsters and Gods of Ancient Greece

“A woman spent about ten minutes looking around the shop, then told me that she was a retired librarian. I suspect she thought that this was some sort of a bond between us. Not so. On the whole, booksellers dislike librarians. To realise a good price for a book, it has to be in decent condition, and there is nothing librarians like more than taking a perfectly good book and covering it with stamps and stickers before – and with no sense of irony – putting a plastic sleeve over the dust jacket to protect it from the public. The final ignominy for a book that has been in the dubious care of a public library is for the front free endpaper to be ripped out and a ‘DISCARD’ stamp whacked firmly onto the title page, before it is finally made available for members of the public to buy in a sale. The value of a book that has been through the library system is usually less than a quarter of one that has not.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“the fact that you’ll never know what sort of person you might have been if you’d read different stuff”
― Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport

“All of them, she thought, an entire culture trained to military order. What a priceless thing is here for an outcast Duke!”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "Oh how banal". To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
― H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“she sees how happiness hides in the humdrum, how it abides in the everyday toing and froing as though happiness were a thing that should not be seen, as though it were a note that cannot be heard until it sounds from the past...”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“[Y]ou are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.”
― Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell

“People who are considered normal enjoy putting those who aren't on trial, you know.”
― Sayaka Murata, コンビニ人間 [Konbini ningen]

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
― Marie Curie

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Matters of great concern should be treated lightly.” Master Ittei commented, “Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.”
― Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

“I hope to arrive to my death, late, in love, and a little drunk.”
― Atticus

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

“We first make our habits, then our habits make us.”
― John Dryden

“involuntary memory is in itself a kind of resurrection, bringing the past back to life, “taking on form and solidity.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

“Proust asserted in Contre Sainte-Beuve, “what the intellect offers us under the name of the past is not the past. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp