Sheska > Sheska's Quotes

“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.”
― David Foster Wallace

“I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up. ~Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad”
― Mark Twain

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
― Francis Bacon, The Essays

“To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.”
― Marquis de Sade

“If a man makes the world his castle, he does not seek to furnish it.”
― Howard Fast, Citizen Tom Paine

“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“What is there in our nature that is for ever urging us on towards pain and misery? We are not formed for enjoyment; and, however we may be attuned to the reception of pleasureable emotion, disappointment is the never-failing pilot of our life's bark, and ruthlessly carries us on to the shoals.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man

“Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.”
― John Ruskin

“Because we were duped I tell you, duped as even yet we hardly realize; because we were misused, hideously misused. They told us it was for the Fatherland, and meant the schemes of annexation of a greedy industry.--They told us it was for Honor, and meant the quarrels and the will to power of a handful of ambitious diplomats and princes.--They told us it was for the Nation, and meant the need for activity on the part of out-of-work generals!...Can't you see? They stuffed out the word Patriotism with all the twaddle of their fine phrases, with their desire for glory, their will to power, their false romanticism, their stupidity, their greed of business, and then paraded it before us as a shining ideal! And we thought they were sounding a bugle summoning us to a new, a more strenuous, a larger life. Can't you see, man? But we were making war against ourselves without even knowing it!...
There is only one fight, the fight against the lie, the half-truth, compromise, against the old order. But we let ourselves be taken in by their phrases; and instead of fighting against them, we fought for them. We thought it was for the Future. It was against the Future. Our future is dead; for the youth is dead that carried it. We are merely the survivors, the ruins. But the other is alive still--the fat, the full, the well content, that lives on, fatter and fuller, more contented than ever! And why? Because the dissatisfied, the eager, the storm troops have died for it.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Road Back

“Sometimes scientists change their minds. New developments cause a rethink. If this bothers you, consider how much damage is being done to the world by people for whom new developments do not cause a rethink.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Science of Discworld

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
― Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“The fact that the biosphere responds unpredictably to our actions is not an argument for inaction. It is, however, a powerful argument for caution, and for adopting a tentative attitude toward all we believe, and all we do. Unfortunately, our species has demonstrated a striking lack of caution in the past. It is hard to imagine that we will behave differently in the future.

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds--and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.”
― Michael Crichton, Prey

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
― Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

“Tell me one thing, Father. Suppose I hadn't been your son, suppose you just knew me, knew the same about me you know now, would you have looked forward to seeing me, to having me live under your roof?'

'Naturally, it wouldn't have been the same.'

'No. And if you had just been a fellow human and not my father, then I wouldn't have come to see you. But doesn't that mean it's nothing but a convention that binds us together? We are father and son, and so we have to show affection for each other, and if we don't we feel guilty. But why? Is there any reasonable basis for believing that affection hinges on biology? We don't feel obligated to be fond of a neighbor or a colleague, do we?”
― Kjell Askildsen, A Sudden Liberating Thought

“Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“All the lessons of history in four sentences:
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.
The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.
The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”
― Charles A. Beard

“El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The sleep of reason produces monsters)”
― Francisco Goya

“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“But a man is not born too soon, Paine had smiled. The world waits for men and dreamers, so how can a man be born too soon?”
― Howard Fast, Citizen Tom Paine

“But why give me hopes?”

“Why did you hope? To desire and to strive after something—that I can understand! But who ever hopes?”
(A Hero of our Time)”
― Lermontov, Mikhail

“No," Rawlins persisted. He shifted about uneasily on the chair. "Now I'm going to say something that will really hurt you, Dick. I'm sorry, but I have to. What you're telling me is the kind of stuff I heard in college. Sophomore cynicism. The world is despicable, you say. Evil, evil, evil. You've seen the true nature of mankind, and you don't want to have anything to do with mankind ever again. Everybody talks that way at eighteen. But it's a phase that passes. We get over the confusions of being eighteen, and we see that the world is a pretty decent place, that people try to do their best, that we're imperfect but not loathsome—"

"An eighteen-year-old has no right to those opinions. I do. I come by my hatreds the hard way."

"But why cling to them? You seem to be glorying in your own misery. Break loose! Shake it off! Come back to Earth with us and forget the past. Or at least forgive.”
― Robert Silverberg, The Man in the Maze

“OD.: Son of a valiant sire, I, too, in youth,
Had once a slow tongue and an active hand.
But since I have proved the world, I clearly see
Words and not deeds give mastery over men.”
― Sophocles, Philoctetes

“PHI.: All winds are fair to him who flies from woe.”
― Sophocles, Philoctetes

“But in truth, neither the lonely meditations of the hermit, nor the tumultuous raptures of the reveller, are capable of satisfying man's heart. From the one we gather unquiet speculation, from the other satiety. The mind flags beneath the weight of thought, and droops in the heartless intercourse of those whose sole aim is amusement. There is no fruition in their vacant kindness, and sharp rocks lurk beneath the smiling ripples of these shallow waters.”
― Mary Shelley, The Last Man Annotated

“Happy are dreamers," he continued, "so that they be not awakened! Would I could dream!”
― Mary Shelley, The Last Man Annotated

“Fear is contagious," the commander explained with a shrug. "If I tried to compare notes with you on the dangers of space travel, there's a chance that all I'd do is start worrying myself, and I can't afford that. You see, Gabriel, there are lots of dangers in our lives that we can't do a thing about-traffic accidents, bad food-dangers that have a low probability rating, but that if they hit will be devastating. All I can do-all anyone can do-is to do my best to put them out of my mind. It may seem like a head-in-the-sand approach to fear, but the only option I see is letting the worries eat you alive-paralyze you to a point where you cease to function. To my thinking, that means you're dead, whether you're still breathing or not. I'd rather try to focus on things I can do something about. I can't danger-proof the universe, or even guarantee my own personal safety. I have no way of telling for sure exactly how long my life is going to be, but I'm determined that while I'm alive, I'm going to be a doer, a worker-not a do-nothing worrier.”
― Robert Lynn Asprin, Phule's Paradise

“In diversity is life and where there's life there's hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“You can’t save a people by selling your friend.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest