Jon Schafle > Jon's Quotes

“I was wise enough never to grow up, while fooling people into believing I had.”
― Margaret Mead

“The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back.”
― Abigail Van Buren

“Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.”
― Francis Bacon

“Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.”
― Phyllis McGinley

“I think; therefore I am.”
― Rene Descartes

“Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”
― Robert Bloch

“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

“In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Books are the carriers of civilization...They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.”
― John Green

“Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep—it can't be done abruptly.”
― Colm Tóibín

“I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.”
― Helen Keller

“I know all about endings. It is beginnings that elude me.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Ancestors of Avalon

“The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.”
― Amy Bloom, Away

“If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly, and my low spirits would brighten up.”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

“Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer.”
― Jean de La Fontaine

“The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.”
― Isabel Allende

“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, Hiroshima Notes

“Let the waters settle and you will see the moon and the stars mirrored in your own being.”
― Rumi

“I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view. ”
― Allen Ginsberg

“If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

“Everyone is so desensitised that the potency of artfully deployed italics has long been lost. It was good enough for H. P. Lovecraft, but apparently it isn’t good enough for the modern world, filled as it is with obtuse bastards.”
― Jonathan L. Howard, The Fear Institute

“Johannes Cabal disliked many things, despised fewer, loathed fewer still, and reserved true hatred for only a handful. Understanding how intense his personal definition of 'dislike' was, however, gives some impression of how hot his hatreds ran. This is a man who had, after all, shot men dead for making him faintly peeved.”
― Jonathan L. Howard, Johannes Cabal the Detective

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow