Jay > Jay's Quotes

“I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

“The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or a woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

“She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

“I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I am rooted, but I flow.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for thy can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“For how can one know colour in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“For all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American. This is not patriotic whoop-de-do; it is carefully observed fact. California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, and Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart. And this is the more remarkable because it has happened so quickly. It is a fact that Americans from all sections and of all racial extractions are more alike than the Welsh are like the English, the Lancashireman like the Cockney, or for that matter the Lowland Scot like the Highlander. It is astonishing that this has happened in less than two hundred years and most of it in the last fifty. The American identity is an exact and provable thing.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America

“This sounds as though I bemoan an older time, which is the preoccupation of the old, or cultivate an opposition to change, which is the currency of the rich and stupid. It is not so. This Seattle was not something changed that I once knew. It was a new thing. Set down there not knowing it was Seattle, I could not have told where I was. Everywhere frantic growth, a carcinomatous growth. Bulldozers rolled up the green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning. The torn white lumber from concrete forms was piled beside gray walls. I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“Moralizing, I observed, then, that “all that glitters is not gold.” Mr. Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold. So I learned then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.”
― Mark Twain, Roughing It

“So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“It’s a life’s work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“For after all, if attentiveness should be measured in minutes and discipline measured in hours, then indomitability must be measured in years.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Science is magic that works.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“In order of importance general appeal responds first to the allure of outstanding personages, second to the reasons why people do things and third to the things people do.”
― Dariel Fitzkee, Showmanship for Magicians

“The minute you stop selling yourself in the entertainment field and start selling your goods instead, that very minute you are starting to pick your own pocket.”
― Dariel Fitzkee, Showmanship for Magicians

“The strongest appeals are invariably to the instincts, not to the mind. When you appeal to the mind, thought is necessary and sometimes reflection. To convince the mind, argument is necessary. And sometimes an argument is lost.”
― Dariel Fitzkee, Showmanship for Magicians

“You can start the planning of your act or routine with the smash climax first and work backwards.”
― Dariel Fitzkee, Showmanship for Magicians