Robert Day > Robert's Quotes

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“It is only in alert silence that truth can be.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living: First Series

“But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“You are this, which does not satisfy, so you want to be that. If there were an understanding of this, would that come into being? Because you do not understand this, you create that, hoping through that to understand or to escape from this.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living: First Series

“I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.”
― Albert Einstein

“I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness”
― E.E. Cummings, Poems, 1923-1954

“Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference...I got set next to this woman...she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it...She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Do you mind if we leave here so I can chain smoke 'til I throw up so it will be easier to quit?”
― Robyn Peterman, Fashionably Dead

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“He had been trussed up like a chicken in his own breeches.”
― Ted Mendelssohn, The Wrong Sword

“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

“You can't choose your childhood, it's just what happens to you. But after that you choose. And that's really what (makes you).”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
― Aristotle

“Societies only have waste products while acquiring fresh raw material remains a cheaper option than recycling.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, The Naked God

“Allan had always reasoned about religion that if you couldn't know for sure then there was no point in going around guessing.”
― Jonas Jonasson, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

“What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”
― Horace Walpole

“It is better to be the cause of an effect rather than be the effect that was caused.”
― Richard Machowicz

“All communication is a sign of failure. If everybody is pleased with the situation, then there is no need for communication.”
― Peter Gärdenfors

“In India they tell a fable about this: There was once a great devotee of Vishnu who prayed night and day to see his God. One night his wish was granted and Vishnu appeared to him. Falling on his knees, the devotee cried out, "I will do anything for you, my Lord, just ask."
"How about a drink of water?" Vishnu replied.
Although surprised by the request, the devotee immediately ran to the river as fast as his legs could carry him. When he got there and knelt to dip up some water, he saw a beautiful woman standing on an island in the middle of the river. The devotee fell madly in love on the spot. He grabbed a boat and rowed over to her. She responded to him, and the two were married. They had children in a house on the island; the devotee grew rich and old plying his trade as a merchant. Many years later, a typhoon came along and devastated the island. The merchant was swept away in the storm. He nearly drowned but regained consciousness on the very spot where he had once begged to see God. His whole life, including his house, wife, and children, seemed never to have happened.
Suddenly he looked over his shoulder, only to see Vishnu standing there in all his radiance.
"Well," Vishnu said, "did you find me a glass of water?”
― Deepak Chopra, How to Know God

“Karma means always wanting more of what won't get you anywhere in the first place.”
― Deepak Chopra, How to Know God

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”
― Aristotle

“An Australian study of more than 12,000 adults estimated that every single hour spent watching television after the age of 25 decreased the viewer’s life expectancy by 22 minutes.”
― Tom Rath, Eat Move Sleep: How Small Choices Lead to Big Changes

“... each of us describes our existence by means of objects which are indifferent to us, which survive us, and which are then thrown back into the common stock from which they are soon gathered again and ascribed other roles in other circumstances.”
― Andrew Motion

“The extinction of all reality is a concept no resignation can encompass. Until annihilation comes. And all grand ideas are seen for what they are.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Counselor: A Screenplay

“At our noblest we announce to the darkness that we will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Counselor (Movie Tie-in Edition): A Screenplay

“A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.”
― Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

“Limburg remained what society had been from the first: an amateur speculation. Life, the provincials insisted, might yet be anything we told it to be.”
― Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2

“Life became an interruption of my description of it.”
― Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2