Richard

“What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Maybe I don't like people as much as the rest of the world seems to. Seems like the human race is in love with itself. What kind of ego do you have to have to think that you were created in God's image? I mean, to invent the idea that God must be like us. Please. As Stanley Kubrick once pointed out, the discovery of more intelligent life somewhere other than Earth would be catastrophic to man, simply because we would no longer be able to think of ourselves as the centre of the universe. I guess I'm slowly becoming one of those crusty old cranks that thinks animals are better than people. But, occasionally, people will pleasantly surprise me and I'll fall in love with one of them, so go figure.”
― Mark Oliver Everett, Things The Grandchildren Should Know