Kevin > Kevin's Quotes

“Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there's a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girlfriend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain.”
― Ken Kesey

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.”
― Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch

“[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.”
― Thornton Wilder

“Books and beer are the best and worst defense.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“To know nothing about yourself is to be constantly in danger of nothingness, those voids of non-being over which a man walks the tightrope of his life.”
― Athol Fugard, Tsotsi

“Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it; those who strive to build a protective wall around it, and those who wish to pull it down; those who seek to mould it and those committed to breaking it up; those who aim to open our eyes, to make us see the light and look to tomorrow [...] and those who wish to lull us into closing our eyes”
― Ngugi wa Thiong'o

“There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”
― Toni Morrison

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.”
― Ben Okri, The Famished Road

“-only human beings can recognize catastrophes, provided they survive them; Nature recognizes no catastrophes.”
― Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene

“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.”
― Voltaire

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”
― Michel Foucault

“Strangely enough I like the kind to which I belong: people.”
― Heinrich Böll

“The last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times