E.S. > E.S.'s Quotes

“In the midst of writing a poem, he suddenly realized that there was not a single pursuit he could think of that was so trivial, so superfluous to living. He was in an academic setting, of course, and that could have been part of the problem. Here poetry was published in slim, arch magazines and read by perhaps twenty-five people who published in the same journals. But it was not just this elitism that troubled Furman. He realized, in the midst of composition, that he could attach any adjective to any noun (the "arbitrary teapot" or the "truculent rose," for instance) and then cobble up some sort of meaning to suit the phrase. There seemed something despicable in this wordplay, a kind of intellectual self-abuse.

Perhaps, he thought, it was only his own poetry that he despised. But no, he discovered that he hated the poetry of all his peers, and, incredibly, all poetry ever written. Behind every poem there seemed to crouch an immensely self-involved ego, the sort of man or woman who would let the infant cry in its cradle while seeking just the right nuance of tone and cadence. The people who wrote poetry were to be avoided as were the poems that emanated from them like methane gas seeping from a swamp.”
― William Browning Spencer, Zod Wallop

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“No social movement has ever progressed without emphasizing division, and doing that means stirring up hate.”
― Nancy Kress, Beggars in Spain

“There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can't face the terror that it might all be random.”
― Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls

“We are so dependent on luck, good and bad. I think of those men and women—cases faintly parallel to mine—who live in one room and eat poorly and lie in bed, since their incomes are too small for any marked activity. Their lives would be unbearable were it not for their hopes of good luck and fears of bad. They have, in fact, little of either; but illusion magnifies what there is.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“Justice is what the strong do the weak.”
― Jonathan Hickman, East of West, Vol. 7

“No one learns from the road walked by another man.”
― Rick Remender, Seven to Eternity, Vol. 4: The Springs of Zhal

“Far more accurately than Jimmy Carter, Reagan understood what made Americans tick: They wanted self-gratification, not self-denial. Although always careful to embroider his speeches with inspirational homilies and testimonials to old-fashioned virtues, Reagan mainly indulged American self-indulgence.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

“Or, as [La Brant] wrote in his memoir: When you have power, 'you exercise it.' When you don't, you try to remove the other side's advantage 'under the cloak of good government.”
― David Daley, Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind The Secret Plan To Steal America's Democracy

“Do you believe in a system where we draw lines to disenfranchise voters?’ Ask that question of the American people and the answer would be overwhelmingly no,” Lessig says. “This is not a theoretical problem! If you’re in one of these districts and you’re in the minority, you have no reason to be part of this democracy. Why would you? The democracy just doesn’t work. We have a country where there are ten states that are competitive in presidential elections. There are a few dozen seats where Congress is competitive. We have all these structures for making the voter irrelevant in the vast majority of America. Why would we do that?”
― David Daley, Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind The Secret Plan To Steal America's Democracy

“Politics had seemed to become, even well before the age of Trump, a mortal affair. It was now zero-sum: When one side profited, another lost. One side’s victory was another’s death. The old notion that politics was a trader’s game, an understanding that somebody else had something you wanted—a vote, goodwill, old-fashioned patronage—and that in the end the only issue was cost, had gone out of fashion. Now it was a battle between good and evil.”
― Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

“Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows. For in this context, to know is not to know. And not to know is to know.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“Freedom granted by your rulers is just a chain with a little slack.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“This is the truth. You will know because it hurts.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“In the absence of direction, claim and expand the freedom to act as you will.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“The conventional wisdom is often wrong.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent—all depending on who wields it and how. Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
― Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket

“Strange, how a moment of existence can cut so deeply into our being that while ages pass unnoticed, a brief love can structure and define the very topology of our consciousness ever after.”
― Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell

“Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives?”
― Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell

“Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.”
― Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell

“Anyone can learn to fight. Hardly anyone learns to think.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“Nothing is all stark and clear any longer, nothing stands in opposition. Good and evil live together; dark and light. Contradictions can be true at once. The world holds a great and pulsing terror at its center. The world is ecstatic in its very deeps.”
― Lauren Groff, Matrix

“The abbess is exhausted and pale. She smiles and says, Oh of course I made it up. Ritual creates its own catharsis, Marie. Mystical acts create mystical beliefs. And then, lulled by the rocking of her fat little horse, the abbess falls asleep.”
― Lauren Groff, Matrix

“There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours, man-hours, using labor more efficiently.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The future becomes insistent.

"This is why something will happen soon, maybe today…to correct the acceleration of time. Bring nature back to normal, more or less.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“A surface separates inside from out and belongs no less to one than the other.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis