Alan > Alan's Quotes

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”
― Wole Soyinka

“If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Wide Window

“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”
― James Bovard, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty

“They solved the problem of coexistence through the use of individual stereo headphones.”
― Stephen Billias, The American Book of the Dead

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

“You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
― Annie Proulx

“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.”
― Cynthia Occelli

“If not love, then what?”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without impact. Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Nevertheless we cherish all books, especially the unread ones, for who knows what secrets they might yield one day?
—p.397, as by Larry Zagorski, in his short story "The City of the Sun”
― Jake Arnott, The House of Rumour

“It's an old story, really: seduced and corrupted, in the end, by an obsessive love for the text.”
― Jack O'Connell, Word Made Flesh

“I must write now and quickly, before I begin to prefer the perfect version that lives in my head.”
― Lettie Prell

“There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behavior and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity. These are frequently artists and performers, adventurers and wide-life devotees.
Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“What made it special made it dangerous, so I bury it... and forget.”
― Kate Bush

“Passing in any crowd are secret people whose hidden response to beauty is the desire to tear it into bleeding meat.”
― James Tiptree Jr.

“Don't be wasting your sympathy on me, kid. I did pretty damn well, I'll tell you what. You snag a woman like that, you don't ask what you did to deserve it. You just hope she never wises up and changes her mind.”
― Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle

“My dad hates umbrellas, said Deeba, swinging her own. When it rains he always says the same thing. 'I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society's usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.”
― China Miéville, Un Lun Dun

“If you love books enough, books will love you back.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings”
― John Gillespie MaGee Jr.

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.”
― Charles Dickens

“Bernard Berenson once said that the formation of the great library he assembled at I Tatti was his greatest achievement. I feel much the same way about the library (as distinct from the bookshop) that I’ve put together in Archer City. The collection—or, more properly, the accumulation—now numbers about 28,000 volumes. If I were beamed up tomorrow my library would attest to the fact that a reader had once been there.

-- "On Rereading," NYRB July 14, 2005”
― Larry McMurtry

“As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

But the frogs die in earnest.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“Just because the relationship ended doesn't mean it wasn't true or good or worth having. Everything expires eventually. Enjoy the good for what it was, not what it always has to be.”
― Iris Goodreads

“Religion is like a pair of shoes.....Find one that fits for you, but don't make me wear your shoes.”
― George Carlin

“I never understood people who don't have bookshelves”
― George Plimpton