Jason > Jason's Quotes

“...But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.”
― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors

“Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.”
― Neil Gaiman

“You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes

“He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens

“You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history”
― Iain M. Banks

“CALVIN:
Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor?

When you think about it, it's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it's funny.

Don't you think it's odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?

HOBBES:
I suppose if we couldn't laugh at the things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.”
― Bill Watterson

“The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.”
― Bill Watterson

“Conservatism is not about tradition and morality, hasn't been for many decades... It is about the putative biological and spiritual superiority of the wealthy.”
― Greg Bear

“Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot”
― Iain M. Banks

“The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.”
― William Gibson

“We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy”
― William Gibson

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
― William Gibson, Count Zero

“Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted.”
― William Gibson, Idoru

“If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”
― David Sedaris, Barrel Fever

“I haven't the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.”
― David Sedaris, Naked

“If you aren't cute, you may as well be clever.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”
― David Sedaris

“After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations. ”
― David Sedaris

“Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“It's astonishing the amount of time that certain straight people devote to gay sex - trying to determine what goes where and how often. They can't imagine any system outside their own, and seem obsessed with the idea of roles, both in bed and out of it. Who calls whom a bitch? Who cries harder when the cat dies? Which one spends the most time in the bathroom? I guess they think that it's that cut-and-dried, though of course it's not. Hugh might do the cooking, and actually wear an apron while he's at it, but he also chops the firewood, repairs the hot-water heater, and could tear off my arm with no more effort than it takes to uproot a dandelion.”
― David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry Into the Limits of the Possible

“One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain!”
― Dolly Parton

“If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.”
― Dolly Parton

“It's a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I'd be a drag queen. ”
― Dolly Parton

“I tried every diet in the book. I tried some that weren't in the book. I tried eating the book. It tasted better than most of the diets.”
― Dolly Parton

“Don't get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.”
― Dolly Parton

“My weaknesses have always been food and men - in that order.”
― Dolly Parton

“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”
― Dolly Parton

“I always just thought if you see somebody without a smile, give'em yours!”
― Dolly Parton

“People always ask me how long it takes to do my hair. I don’t know, I’m never there.”
― Dolly Parton

“Storms make trees take deeper roots.”
― Dolly Parton

“I was the first woman to burn my bra - it took the fire department four days to put it out.”
― Dolly Parton

“Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be" - she always called me Elwood - "In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me. ”
― Mary Chase, Harvey

“…because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff… Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.”
― John Green