Brian Burris > Brian's Quotes

“We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. Our soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.”
― Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas

“The day Edward Bloom was born, it rained.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“The way humans hunt for parking and the way animals hunt for food are not as different as you might think.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

“Men may or may not be better drivers than women, but they seem to die more often trying to prove that they are.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

“It's probably no accident that whenever one hears of a smart technology, it refers to something that has been taken out of human control.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

“The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.”
― Thomas de Quincey

“Child of the kindly West, I have come to know, if more of us valued your ways - food and cheer above hoarded gold - it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“The world is full of rattlesnakes. Sometimes you step on them and they don’t bite. Sometimes you step over them and they bite anyway.”
― Stephen King, You Like It Darker

“Grief sleeps but doesn’t die. At least not until the griever does.”
― Stephen King, You Like It Darker

“We thought we were old but we didn’t know what old was.”
― Stephen King, You Like It Darker

“I should have come to see him these last years, but I was busy with my own affairs. I thought to myself, there’s time. We always think that, I guess. Then time runs out.”
― Stephen King, You Like It Darker