Rob's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 50)

"...I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us."
— William Gibson (Idoru)

14 people liked it

"...but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt."
— José Saramago

9 people liked it

"If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote."
— David Foster Wallace (Up, Simbal!: 7 Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate)

tags: politics, voting
78 people liked it

"Had I done the right thing by not telling her? Maybe not. Who on earth wanted the right thing anyway? Yet what meaning could there be if nothing was right? If nothing was fair? Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase."
— Haruki Murakami (Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World)

5 people liked it

"Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don't respect cowards."
— David Mitchell (Ghostwritten)

tags: respect
2 people liked it

"We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones."
— Robert Wright (The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology)

tags: evolution, science
2 people liked it

"There's a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition."
— Austin Grossman (Soon I Will Be Invincible)

7 people liked it

"That's where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins."
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz)

tags: apocalypse, conscience
2 people liked it

"Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn't make it a living breathing novel. A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

tags: writing
8 people liked it

"Down in the city are the nice houses and the so-so houses and the lovers making out in dark yards and the babies crying for their moms, and I wonder if, other than Jesus, has this ever happened before. Maybe it happens all the time. Maybe there's angry dead all over, hiding in rooms, covered with blankets, bossing around their scared, embarrassed relatives. Because how would we know?"
— George Saunders (Pastoralia)

tags: ambulothanatophobia
2 people liked it

"In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes."
— Dan Simmons

tags: history, literature, writing
3 people liked it

"In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He'd carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

4 people liked it

"The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away."
— Linus Pauling

5 people liked it

"Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it."
— Raymond Carver (Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories)

tags: booze
9 people liked it

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

tags: humor
118 people liked it

"Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar."
— Vladimir Nabokov (The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov)

tags: beauty
8 people liked it

"If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!"
— John Waters

tags: books, fuck, profanity, reading
357 people liked it

"Gold is the corpse of value..."
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)

tags: gold, money, value
4 people liked it

"We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to customers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce that designs that assemble long lists of features."
— Douglas Crockford (JavaScript: The Good Parts)

tags: development, javascript, philosophy, programming, simplicity, software
1 person liked it

"Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy."
— Joseph Campbell

7 people liked it

"The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools."
— Larry Niven (Ringworld)

tags: commentary, fiction, science, social
22 people liked it

"...what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?"
— Jonathan Lethem

tags: postmodernism
1 person liked it

"The first time he had taken the massa to one of these "high-falutin' to-dos," as Bell called them, Kunta had been all but overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: awe, indignation, envy, contempt, fascination, revulsion—but most of all a deep loneliness and melancholy from which it took him almost a week to recover. He couldn't believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn't live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it's possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother's milk made possible the life of privilege they led."
— Alex Haley (Roots)

tags: delusion, privilege, slavery, wealth
2 people liked it

"For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside."
— Jonathan Lethem

tags: culture, humor, modernism, pop, postmodernism, television, writing
2 people liked it

"These cities grew in approximately the same places as our cities do now, however different the shape of the continents was. There was even a New York that in some way resembled the New York familiar to all of you, but was much newer, or, rather, more awash with new products, new toothbrushes, a New York with its own Manhattan that stretched out dense with skyscrapers gleaming like the nylon bristles of a brand-new toothbrush."
— Italo Calvino

tags: descriptive, humor, surreal
1 person liked it

"The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet."
— William Gibson

tags: future, planning
6 people liked it

"After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident."
— JG Ballard

4 people liked it

"Horses are far worse than men for treachery..."
— James Clavell (Shogun)

tags: horses, treachery
1 person liked it

"...quantum mechanics—the physics of our world—requires that you hold such pedestrian complaints in abeyance."
— Brian Greene (The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory)

tags: humor, mechanics, physics, quantum, science
3 people liked it

"Shit is the tofu of cursing."
— David Sedaris

tags: profanity, shit, swearing
65 people liked it

"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

tags: art, conceptual, crystal-meth, drugs
46 people liked it

"Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?"
— David Sedaris

tags: fashion, humor, self-doubt, self-worth
27 people liked it

"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

33 people liked it

"I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself."
— David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)

tags: gender, language, words
9 people liked it

"America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice."
— George Saunders (In Persuasion Nation)

tags: america
1 person liked it

"He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language."
— Angela Carter (Wayward Girls and Wicked Women)

tags: doll, language, mimcry, puppet, undead
1 person liked it

"The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small."
— Carl Sagan (Cosmos)

tags: astronomy, awe, galaxy, science
1 person liked it

"Her heavy peasant face was fringed by a bang of red hair like a woollen table-spread, a colour at once strange and attractive, an obstinate colour, a colour that seemed to make Lena feel something alien and bad-tempered had settled over her forehead..."
— Djuna Barnes

tags: alien, bad-tempered, color, hair, humor, red
1 person liked it

"The tree feels splintery, nasty to my touch; it feels Floridian, more reptile than vegetable, more stucco than stone. I do loathe this state, their Elba."
— Allan Gurganus (Plays Well with Others)

tags: descriptive, florida, loathing, reptile, vegetable
1 person liked it

"I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire."
— Tennessee Williams

8 people liked it

"Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue."
— Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus)

tags: cold, desolate, horror, ice, rail, siberia, splendour, train, travel, white, winter
2 people liked it

"Life isn't fair, and programming is even less fair."
— Wil Shipley

tags: fair, fairness, life, programming
1 person liked it

"And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just as useless at looking after themselves, can't handle their cash just like the rich can't, always squandering it on bright, pretty, useless things in just the same way."
— Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus)

tags: foolishness, irony, money, poor, poverty, rich, wealth
1 person liked it

"The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown."
— Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus)

tags: children, clown, laughter, purity
5 people liked it

"We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity."
— Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus)

tags: humanity, love, scarecrow
4 people liked it

"Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital."
— Edmund Morris (Theodore Rex)

tags: capital, capitalism, labor, socialism, synecdoche, violence
1 person liked it

"Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen."
— Samuel R. Delany (Dhalgren)

tags: anticipation, chaos, city, moon, moons
2 people liked it

"One picks one's way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists' smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define good taste in such loud voices one can hardly hear oneself giggle, while the shebang is lit by flashes and flares through the paint-stained window, glimmers under the police-locked door, or, if one is taking a rare walk outside that day, by a light suffusing the whole sky, complex as the northern aurora."
— Samuel R. Delany (Dhalgren)

tags: art, authorship, taste
1 person liked it

"I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten."
— David Foster Wallace

tags: cruelty, doubt, innocence, parents
1 person liked it

"A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope."
— Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle)

tags: despair, existentialism, future, hopelessness
1 person liked it

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