Abid Uzair > Abid's Quotes

“I didn't understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without meanness?”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“When you shit, as you first sit down, you’re not fully in the experience yet. You are not yet a shitting person. You’re transitioning from a person about to shit to a person who is shitting. You don’t whip out your smartphone or a newspaper right away. It takes a minute to get the first shit out of the way and get in the zone and get comfortable. Once you reach that moment, that’s when it gets really nice. It’s a powerful experience, shitting. There’s something magical about it, profound even. I think God made humans shit in the way we do because it brings us back down to earth and gives us humility. I don’t care who you are, we all shit the same. Beyoncé shits. The pope shits. The Queen of England shits. When we shit we forget our airs and our graces, we forget how famous or how rich we are. All of that goes away. You”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“If we studied birds, maybe we could learn to be free.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Trevor, make sure your woman is the woman in your life. Don't be one of those men who makes his wife compete with his mother. A man with a wife cannot be beholden to his mother.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“I was in love with the innocence of dogs, the purity of their affection. They didn't know enough to hide their feelings. They existed. A dog was a dog. There was such a simple elegance about being a dog that I envied.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Words were different when they lived inside of you.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“The Ari I used to be didn't exist anymore. And the Ari I was becoming? He didn't exist yet.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Ari?” My father’s voice was soft. “Ari, Ari, Ari. You’re fighting this war in the worst possible way.”

“I don’t know how to fight it, Dad.”

“You should ask for help,” he said.

“I don’t know how to do that, either.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

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

“No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. —NDT”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

“Marriage can wait, education cannot.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

“Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“What we do know, and what we can assert without further hesitation, is that the universe had a beginning. The universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago. We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun. †”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it.”
― William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide To Writing Nonfiction

“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
― George Orwell

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
― George Orwell

“What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender them.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases - bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder - one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy, the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.”
― Richard Feynman

“I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”
― Richard Feynman