Jenni Ritchie > Jenni's Quotes

“Then she told herself to stop her nonsense. If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them, more easily each time, so easily, soon, that you did not even realize you had gone out searching.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
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"There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."
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"But they used to take morphia and cocaine."
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"Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178."
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"Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."
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"Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."
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"All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."
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"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."
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"Stability was practically assured.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“...two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.”
― Aldous Huxley

“I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley

“We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Most lead lives at worst so painful, at best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principle appetites of the soul.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves. ”
― Aldous Huxley

“Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Anti-cat is one jump away from anti-Semitism.”
― Philip K. Dick, Eye In The Sky

“He won’t be diving straight for the human flesh. But a cat has got to eat, and you are the person who feeds him. This is the cat-human compact. Death doesn’t free you from performing your contractual obligations.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And Other Questions About Dead Bodies