Albert Wang > Albert's Quotes

“Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“By setting out models for how men should act to seduce women, these texts also implicitly script appropriate female behavior. Women who react appropriately, or as expected, to seduction techniques are rewarded with the descriptor "feminine," whereas those who do not follow standard seduction scripts are unnatural and unwomanly.

Such guides do not only give advice to men; they also condition their readers to expect certain kinds of female behavior and give them permission to feel violently angry when women do not conform to those behavioral models.”
― Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age

“The litmus test of any democracy is the level of tolerance it is willing to extend towards the minorities living in it. In this respect, Israel falls far short of being a true democracy.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“A man was speaking, so I stopped listening.”
― Jasmine Mas, Blood of Hercules

“Mental note—physical exertion makes me homicidal. Avoid anything above a brisk walk.”
― Jasmine Mas, Blood of Hercules

“In what world do men and women pay the same price for passion?”
― S.A. Chakraborty, The City of Brass

“I've had enough of men hurting me because they were upset.”
― S.A. Chakraborty, The Kingdom of Copper

“all this means that during the Bronze Age, a sophisticated syllabic script was developed to represent the Greek language in writing, and then during the collapse you told me about, all that knowledge was completely destroyed. Later writing systems devised to represent Greek bear no relation to Linear B. The people who developed and used them had no idea that Linear B had ever even existed. The unbearable thing is that when first inscribed, those markings meant something, to the people who wrote and read them, and then for thousands of years they meant nothing, nothing, nothing – because the link was broken, history had stopped. And then the twentieth century shook the watch and made history happen again. But can’t we do that too, in another way?”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Get it into your thick head that jokes are just like life. Things that begin badly, end badly. Everything's fine in the middle, it's the end you need to worry about.”
― László Krasznahorkai, Satantango

“Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.”
― Seamus Heaney

“If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.”
― Seamus Heaney, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney

“Do you need an audience to create work, or does not having an audience liberate you and make you a truer artist?”
― Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia

“The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is the only thing that matters.”
― Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia

“To tell the truth, girls are no longer the way they used to be. They play gangsters, nowadays, just like boys. They organize rackets. They plan holdups and practice karate. They will rape defenseless adolescents. They wear pants... Life has become impossible.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, Djinn

“the world is neither meaningful, nor absurd. it quite simply is, and that, in any case, is what is so remarkable about it.”
― Robbe-Grillet Alain

“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.”
― Alain Robbe Grillet

“Look for the copper tablet-box,
Undo its bronze lock,
Open the door to its secret,
Lift out the lapis lazuli tablet and read it,
The story of that man, Gilgamesh, who went through all kinds of sufferings.”
― Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others

“The daughter of Sin was determined to go
To the dark house, dwelling of Erkalla's god,
To the house which those who enter cannot leave,
On the road where travelling is one-way only,
To the house where those who enter are deprived of light,
Where dust is their food, clay their bread.
They see no light, they dwell in darkness,
They are clothed like birds, with feathers.”
― Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others

“Humans are aware of very little, it seems to me, the artificial brainy side of life, the worries and bills and the mechanisms of jobs, the doltish psychologies we've placed over our lives like a stencil. A dog keeps his life simple and unadorned.”
― Brad Watson, Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories

“I believed that books might save him because I knew they had so far, and because I knew the people books had saved.”
― Rebecca Makkai

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”
― Lorrie Moore

“Fascist art displays a utopian aesthetics—that of physical perfection. Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.”
― Susan Sontag, Fascinating Fascism

“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“Had we but World enough, and Time,
This coyness Lady were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long Loves Day.”
― Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

“The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present

“The master swordsman isn't interested in killing people. He only wants to perfect his art.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“I would see languages with shades of each other, like the colours of Cézanne which often have a green with some red a red with some green, in my mind I saw a glowing still life as if a picture of English with French words French with English words German with French words & English words Japanese with French English & German words—I was just about to leave when I met a man who seemed to know quite a lot about Schoenberg.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“Americans invented jazz; the French, Brazilians and Japanese also understand it. It is important to have formal training in the classical repertoire, but a true musician is not a train which can only run on the rails. My mother admired Bill Evans.”
― Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool

“You're not the kind of girl who'd be in a place like this at a time like this. Not the kind of girl who'd sit next to a guy who's the kind of guy who'd be in Bright Lights, Big City II and be so [spaced out/coked up/polypharmaceutically prepositioned/ (Add/delete as appropriate)] that he thinks he's the kind of guy who'd be in a pastiche of Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. It was pre-assigned seating.”
― Helen DeWitt, Your Name Here

“It’s not against Lottery regulations to lose, obviously - somebody’s got to - but it’s against the Rules to be seen to lose. It’s against the Rules to be seen to win. It’s not just that you break the Rules by sitting there. It’s that you put everyone else in the position of ostentatious Rulebreakers, manoeuvred into flashing their luck just by walking to work.”
― Helen DeWitt, Your Name Here