A.J. Howard

https://www.goodreads.com/ajhoward

A.J.’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (3)
currently-reading‎ (0)
read‎ (1764)
did-not-finish‎ (0)
shelved-for-now‎ (2)
bookshelf-fiction‎ (643)
history‎ (577)
sff‎ (336)
1001-books‎ (290)
historical-fiction‎ (185)
guardian-1000‎ (173)
biography‎ (165)

finished-in-2021‎ (144)
bancroft-wolfson-parkman-pulitzer‎ (123)
finished-in-2011‎ (123)
finished-in-2020‎ (118)
finished-in-2018‎ (117)
finished-in-2024‎ (110)
thrillers-etc‎ (109)
electioneering‎ (106)
finished-in-2010‎ (105)
finished-in-2019‎ (101)
finished-in-2017‎ (100)
time-100‎ (91)

finished-in-2022‎ (85)
sports‎ (83)
finished-in-2023‎ (80)
short-stories‎ (80)
modern-library-100-novels‎ (74)
finished-in-2014‎ (73)
nobel‎ (72)
cultural-currency‎ (70)
finished-in-2013‎ (65)
finished-in-2012‎ (63)
finished-in-2025‎ (61)
finished-in-2015‎ (59)

music‎ (58)
finished-in-2016‎ (57)
picture-books‎ (57)
read-more-than-once‎ (54)
finished-in-2026‎ (52)
essays‎ (48)
six-stars‎ (48)
saturday-nights-and-sunday-mornings‎ (42)
finished-in-2009‎ (32)
modern-library-100-nonfiction‎ (31)
nixanigans‎ (20)
science‎ (20)

Stats | More…

“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!”
― George Carlin

tags: atheism, humor, life, religion

6693 likes

“People were standing up everywhere shouting, "This is me! This is me!" Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea who or what they were than he had. They believed their flashing signs, too. They ought to be standing up and shouting, "This isn't me! This isn't me!" They would if they had any decency. "This isn't me!" Then you might know how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

93 likes

“Tell me this, pal, why isn't everybody sitting on a fence in the moonlight playing a banjo? That's all I want to know.”
― Vincent Lawrence

4 likes

“Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me “Pa”
That must be what it’s all about
That must be what it’s all about”
― Bob Dylan, Lyrics, 1962-2001

9 likes

“For I say to you in all the sadness of conviction, that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone – when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will – then only will you have achieved. Thus only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who have never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought – the subtle rapture of a postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

15 likes

More of A.J.’s quotes…