Keith > Keith's Quotes

“I wish I did not think about it so much, he thought.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“You will lead, you will strike up the march of the future, boys will swear by your name, and thanks to your madness they will no longer need to be mad.”
― Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

“You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrasing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was as authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at León and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that you own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to work to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“Perhaps…the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“Insularity plus time yields divergence.”
― Quammen, David

“The dodo itself stands as the best emblem of this general truth - that insular evolution often involves transforming an adventurous, high-flying ancestor species into a grounded descendant, no longer capable of going anywhere but extinct. It's our reminder that insular evolution, for all its wondrousness, tends to be a one-way tunnel toward doom.”
― Quammen, David

“MacArthur himself was more interested in the similarities among phenomena, because similarities reveal the workings of regular processes....I've already quoted MacArthur's statement that to do science "is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts.”
― Quammen, David

“Theory in any branch of science entails a risk of detachment from reality”
― Quammen, David

“Exile must be a terrible thing, said Norton sympathetically.

"Actually," said Amalfitano, "now I see it as a natural movement, something that, in its way, helps to abolish fate, or what is generally thought of as fate."

"But exile," said Pelletier, "is full of inconveniences, of skips and breaks that essentially keep recurring and interfere with anything you try to do that's important."

"That's just what I mean by abolishing fate," said Amalfitano. "But again, I beg your pardon.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“You can't live in this world but there's nowhere else to go.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“...the reading of many books brings wisdom, and the reading of one brings ignorance armed with rage and hatred.”
― Danilo Kiš

“I wish to live in peace with myself and not with the world.”
― Danilo Kiš, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

“He who has seen the present has seen everything, that which happened in the most distant past and that which will happen in the future.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“It is neither perfidy nor cunning nor vice that forces us to rage like vengeful animals; it is our inborn feelings of humanity and justice: without nobility of the soul we should never know righteous indignation.... [O]ur souls work like swings: the stronger the push up towards the nobility of the soul, the stronger the swoop down towards the fury of the beast.”
― M. Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

“I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake up in the middle of the night and begin to realise, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not only their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life.”
― M. Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine