Paul > Paul's Quotes

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“Trust me, I'm telling you stories.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
― Anne Lamott

“The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, ridgidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom,--a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom,--is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality.”
― John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“[I]n any profession the highest order of work is achieved, not by fussy empirical demands for 'something to be done,' but by patient study of the eternal laws.”
― Henry Whitehead

“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”
― Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

“There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“The truth of a myth...is not in its words but its patterns.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Act, implores the Ghost of Future Regret. I shan't give you another chance.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“We were, to quote the proverb,
"The one dog who barks at nothing answered by a thousand dogs barking at something...”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Self pity, Orito reminds herself yet again, is a noose dangling from a rafter.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Naming, thinks Jacob, even in ridicule, gives what is named substance.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Don't let death, Jacob reproves himself, be your final thought.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“We all owe death a life.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“After a winter's gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“So he lent her books. After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I've drunk.”
― William Vollmann

“Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.”
― William T. Vollmann

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“Understand this clearly: you can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.”
― John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice