Terry's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 885)

"Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream."
— Charles Baxter (The Feast of Love)

tags: art, cream, humor, ice
5 people liked it

"Ethics is a dream."
— Charles Baxter (The Feast of Love)

tags: ethics, morality, philosophy
1 person liked it

"The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us."
— Wendell Berry

tags: concrete, road, word
1 person liked it

"...condemning Nyasha to whoredom, making her a victim of her femaleness, just as I had felt victimised at home in the days when Nhamo went to school and I grew my maize. The victimisation, I saw, was universal. It didn't depend on poverty, on lack of education or on tradition. It didn't depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on. Men took it everywhere with them. Even heroes like Babamukuru did it. And that was the problem. You had to admit Nyasha had no tact. You had to admit she was altogether too volatile and strong-willed. You couldn't ignore the fact that she had no respect for Babamukuru when she ought to have had lots of it. But what I didn't like was the way that all conflicts came back to the question of femaleness. Femaleness as opposed and inferior to maleness."
— Tsitsi Dangarembga (Nervous Conditions)

2 people liked it

"I was struck by a shallow figure of speech. . . . that Christianity was the handmaiden of capitalism."
— V Y Mudimbe

tags: capitalism, christianity
1 person liked it

"Isn't simplification sometimes impoverishment? How to convey the richness of the message with a poverty of symbols. If we oversimplify the form, don't we kill the content?"
— V Y Mudimbe

tags: content, form, message, simplification, symbol
1 person liked it

"What obliged her to put her faith in a foreign religion. Catholic, universal, what you will, the problem remains: Catholicism springs from the Western world. Even to understand it is European. It is supported by Europe's institutions, and one can love it only by enrolling oneself in the history of a civilization."
— V Y Mudimbe

tags: catholic, catholicism, foreign, religion
1 person liked it

"A liberation movement is doomed once it stops to haggle over nuances of good and evil."
— V Y Mudimbe

tags: evil, good, liberation
1 person liked it

"Forget language. Afer all, it bores me. The senses. And this much is true: any communication must transcend the immediacy of solidarity, must be mediated by ideological and economic connections. And there the senses reappear. No use giving in to words."
— V Y Mudimbe

tags: communication, language, senses, word
1 person liked it

"Guilt -- if there was any guilt -- spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything. . . . Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed."
— Philip K Dick

tags: guilt, responsibility
2 people liked it

"I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on."
— Julia Glass

tags: culture, names
1 person liked it

"In the new century science will defeat famine, boredom, and the plague, but . . . vital knowledge will become so elevated that nobody will know how anything works. . . . the good news is that everybody will be empowered; the bad news is nobody will understand why."
— Mark Christensen (Aloha: A Novel of the Near Future)

tags: knowledge, science
1 person liked it

"I say that almost everywhere there is beauty enough to fill a person's life if one would only be sensitive to it. but Henry says No: that broken beauty is only a torment, that one must have a whole beauty with man living in relation to it to have a rich civilization and art. . . . Is it because I am a woman that I accept what crumbs I may have, accept the hot-dog stands and amusement parks if I must, if the blue is bright beyond them and the sunset flushes the breasts of sea birds?"
— Elizabeth Coatsworth (Personal Geography: Almost and Autobiography)

tags: art, beauty, civilization, woman
1 person liked it

"The magic of autumn has seized the countryside; now that the sun isn't ripening anything it shines for the sake of the golden age; for the sake of Eden; to please the moon for all I know."
— Elizabeth Coatsworth (Personal Geography: Almost and Autobiography)

tags: age, autumn, golden, moon, sun
1 person liked it

"All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

tags: adaptability, madness, survival
14 people liked it

"Christianity is a religion in a rush."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

tags: christianity, religion
4 people liked it

"We are all born like Catholics . . . in limbo, without religion."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

tags: catholicism, religion
2 people liked it

"Religion is more than rite and ritual."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

tags: religion, rite, ritual
2 people liked it

"I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

tags: islam, religion
15 people liked it

"Geeky people often have. . . . a mind with its own heartbeat."
— Garret Freeman-Weyr

tags: geeks
2 people liked it

"If every word introduces a new concept, the simple phrase "all that which does not exist" is sufficient to make everything that does not exist, exist."
— Pablo Tusset (The Best Thing That Can Happen to a Croissant)

tags: words
1 person liked it

"To say "all that which does not exist" is to introduce, effectively, a new concept, but it does not bring into existence anything more than that very concept which it introduces. That is, a certain entity about which we know nothing except that it bears the name of "all that which does not exist.""
— Pablo Tusset (The Best Thing That Can Happen to a Croissant)

tags: being, concepts, reality, words
1 person liked it

"I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.""
— Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)

tags: books, logic, stories
1 person liked it

"Homeopaths argue that water has a memory."
— Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)

tags: homeopathy, memory, water
1 person liked it

"Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg."
— Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)

tags: books, cybernetics, ideas, images, thoughts
5 people liked it

"If something wants to be a story, it will be."
— Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)

tags: story
5 people liked it

"Most people would look at an animal in a cage and instinctively feel that it should be set free. . . . It's a dangerous world out there, filled with predators. . . . What would you prefer? A comfortable, safe, warm, cosy life in a cage, or an uncertain life of freedom."
— Scarlett Thomas (Going Out)

tags: animals, cages, danger, freedom
2 people liked it

"In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure."
— Scarlett Thomas (Going Out)

tags: reality, structure
1 person liked it

"Not all events are stories."
— Scarlett Thomas (Going Out)

tags: events, stories
1 person liked it

"People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning."
— Scarlett Thomas (Going Out)

tags: events, stories
1 person liked it

"Assessing existence while failing to embrace the insights of modern physics would be like wrestling in the dark with an unknown opponent."
— Brian Greene

tags: existence, physics
4 people liked it

"The heart of their [Walsingham Witnesses] religion seemed to lie in disproving the religion of others."
— Rosemary Mahoney (The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground)

tags: religion
1 person liked it

"Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

tags: ineffable, walking
1 person liked it

"Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

tags: walking
1 person liked it

"The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

tags: epiphany, errand, magic, street
2 people liked it

"Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

tags: imagination, language, street
1 person liked it

"Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

tags: architecture, cities, language, possiblity, walking
1 person liked it

"The soul is the form of the body, but not as the shape of a statue is formatio et terminatio materiae, for form does not exist apart from material. There is no whiteness without a white object. But the soul is not a form in this simple sense, and in particular, is not the shape of the material it informs. Therefore, the shape of a being does not affect the being's soul, for then something lower would inform something higher, which is impossible."
— Michael Flynn (Eifelheim)

tags: content, form, soul
1 person liked it

"Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts."
— Paul Simon (The Definitive Paul Simon Songbook)

tags: heroes
1 person liked it

"A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

tags: alienation, walking
1 person liked it

"The promenade is a special subset of walking."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

tags: promenade, walking
1 person liked it

"A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

tags: journey, labyrinth, maps, walking
1 person liked it

"Roads are a record of those who have gone before."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

tags: roads
1 person liked it

"A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

tags: landscape, path
1 person liked it

"Walking is a pastime rather than an avocation."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

tags: walking
1 person liked it

"A procession is a participants' journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

tags: parade, procession
1 person liked it

"Every name is real. That's the nature of names."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

tags: names
11 people liked it

"Home is everything you can walk to."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

tags: home, walking
1 person liked it

"There are stories told to him only at this time of year. Fantastic, magical stories, the old Hollier in the woods finding only three red berries, which peel back in the night to reveal gifts of frankincense, gold and myrrh, Christmas in hot deserts, dust-blown countries, the necklace of tears, and the story of the robin."
— Sarah Hall (Haweswater: A Novel)

tags: christmas, stories
1 person liked it

"Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too."
— Charles Baxter (The Feast of Love)

tags: retirement
1 person liked it

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