Jonathan > Jonathan's Quotes

“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."

[On British Labour politician Stafford Cripps.]”
― Winston S. Churchill, Wealth, War and Wisdom

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I can resist anything except temptation.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
― Dorothy Parker

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
― Sid Ziff

“Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.”
― Dorothy Parker

“They sicken of the calm who know the storm.”
― Dorothy Parker, Sunset Gun: Poems

“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Collected Dorothy Parker

“That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say 'No' in any of them.”
― Dorothy Parker, While Rome Burns

“Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.”
― George Bernard Shaw, BBC Radio presents Man and superman

“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”
― Puck Magazine

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

(Letter 16, 1657)”
― Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters

“I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“If it is stupid but it works, it isn't stupid.
(a Shin'a'in saying)”
― Mercedes Lackey, Owlknight

“If only. Those must be the two saddest words in the world.”
― Mercedes Lackey

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Rattlesnakes would be a lot more dangerous if they didn't have the rattle.”
― Louis Sachar, Holes

“Old stories would tell how Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To act--to Weave--was to bring about more pleasing patterns. They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the appreciation of beauty.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“A sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a fungus.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“I do not dream, der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry…each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.

Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that limitless, sprawling web.

It is without beginning or end. It is complex to a degree that humbles the mind. It is a work of such beauty that my soul wept...

..I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“Fortune-telling was quantum betting, a competitive scrying of variably likely outcomes.”
― China Miéville, Kraken

“...her own experience was beginning to tell her that an alert old age can be more keen than the cards.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.”
― China Miéville, The Scar