"Nobody knows how to just shut the fuck up and look out the window anymore."
— Paul Neilan

"The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong."
— Philip Roth

"In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery."
— William Kingdon Clifford

"Every other way is like that -- him waiting for something to happen to him, daring somebody to do something nice such as come up and touch him just so he could say, 'Why in the world did you do that?' and hold on tight till whoever bothered him vanished -- and nothing about him since has ever surprised me."
— Reynolds Price