Jerrodm > Jerrodm's Quotes

“After he saw God he felt really good, for around a year. And then he felt really bad. Worse than he ever had before in his life. Because one day it came over him, he began to realize, that he was never going to see God again; he was going to live out his whole remaining life, decades, maybe fifty years, and see nothing but what he had always seen. What we see. He was worse off than if he hadn't seen God.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just—change. With nothing causing it.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well.”
― Philip K. Dick

“If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“That's the duty of the old," said the Librarian, "to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.”
― Philip Pullman

“Lyra had to adjust to her new sense of her own story, and that couldn't be done in a day.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“You cannot change what you are, only what you do.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“The wave function of this situation is going to collapse quite soon.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“I read that the term "nostalgia" originated in a seventeenth-century medical student's dissertation, when he mixed the Greek work nostos, "return to the native land," with algos, "suffering, grief," to describe the madness of mercenaries who spent all their lives moving and trying to remember. It was classified as a potentially fatal disease. Isn't that crazy? To die from wanting to return. But I miss things that were never mine, want to return to a place, more of a feeling, that never really existed, and doesn't baseball always promise that there was once something more?”
― Lucas Mann, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere

“I have always loved the idea of losing when beauty is gained from the loss, when there is deep, orchestral consequence to what is ending...But real failure is muted and swift, especially in the minor leagues, especially at this level. There are no options to it, no metaphor attached. No wisdom to be gained.”
― Lucas Mann, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere

“The moment you can be anything else at all, you are not aimed at being great at one thing.”
― Lucas Mann, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere

“The radioman is the world creator. The radioman interprets moments that almost nobody else sees, and maybe sometimes he invents them. Because everything else is blank. On television, for the fractional percent of announcers who make that leap to the screen, their art becomes ornamentation to the images of the players that everyone cares about and the graphics that can exactly quantify a player's habits, trends, worth. Some of the larger A-ball markets have occasional TV coverage of their games. It's a terrible idea, primarily because it removes the opportunity to imagine beyond the confines of ever-dull reality...It's like watching a recently exhumed video of a child's talent show, the triumph instantly exposed for how small it really was.”
― Lucas Mann, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere

“The more you care about something, the more you are set up to look foolish. I have tried to live by this basic truth, pushing towards nonchalance and irony. Because there are always others, less invested, who will look at you with withering contempt.”
― Lucas Mann, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone´s intention. We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all.”
― Kahneman

“The past is latent, is submerged, but still there, capable of rising to the surface once the later imprinting unfortunately--and against ordinary experience--vanished. The man contains--not the boy--but earlier men, he thought. History began a long time ago.”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik

“Emptiness. He saw no one, only a large chamber with pewlike rows of seats and, at the far end, a casket surrounded by flowers. Off in a small sideroom an old-fashioned reed pump organ and a few wooden folding chairs. The mortuary smelled of dust and flowers, a sweet, stale mixture that repelled him. Think of all the Iowans, the thought, who've embraced eternity in this listless room.”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik

“He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik

“It did not seem possible that Wendy Wright had been born out of blood and internal organs like other people. In proximity to her he felt himself to be a squat, oily, sweating, uneducated nurt whose stomach rattled and whose breath wheezed. Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed. Seeing her face, he discovered that his own consisted of a garish mask; noticing her body made him feel like a low-class wind-up toy.”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik

“For no matter the shadows of an age, the picture of a young couple in love, we are told, speaks most luminously of the future, as the span of that passion makes us believe we can overleap any walls, obliterate whatever obstacles.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“That’s sensationalized, to be sure, and yet there are all sorts of rumors and anecdotes and semiofficial reports that over the decades have grown into a bank of lore about the counties that each of us adds to whenever we repeat that saying or others with which we admonish our naturally curious children. Thank goodness they are curious! It’s a sign of healthy minds. And while it may be obvious, it’s our responsibility to educate them to the idea that romancing the unknown is attended by myriad possibilities, too, shepherding them through those heady periods of urge and instinct when they think they can soar, and deliver them, we hope whole, to a place where perspective begins to reign, where they know that the groggy old bear at the zoo will instantly wake the moment you step inside the cage.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“It is well known that the human mind very often makes decisions for reasons it clearly does not know, presumably because it does so after having travelled the paths of the mind at such speed that, afterwards, it cannot recognise those paths, let alone find them again.”
― José Saramago, All the Names

“Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.”
― José Saramago, All the Names

“Prudence tried to hold him back, grip him by the sleeve, but, as everyone knows, or should know, prudence is only of any use when it is trying to conserve something in which we are no longer interested.”
― José Saramago, All the Names

“Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions, decisions make us.”
― José Saramago, All the Names

“What torments people have to go through when they leave the safety of their homes to become embroiled in mad adventures.”
― José Saramago, All the Names

“All the great sadnesses, great temptations, and great mistakes are almost always the result of being alone in life, without a prudent friend to advise us when we are troubled by something more serious than our normal everyday problems.”
― José Saramago, All the Names

“Old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him or herself in us, 'Who's that looking at me so sadly,' he or she would say.”
― José Saramago, All the Names