Duncan Swann > Duncan's Quotes

“The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?”
― Gilles Deleuze

“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928

“Remember, you are the same today as you will be in five years, except for two things: the people you meet and the books you read. Choose both carefully.”
― Charlie "Tremendous" Jones

“Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.”
― Socrates

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

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.”
― Susan Faludi

“Or, as Razib Khan, a geneticist and science blogger, put it, culture is chunky, whereas genes are creamy.”
― Christine Kenneally

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“Satan, on the contrary, is thin, ascetic and a fanatical devotee of logic. He reads Machiavelli, Ignatius of Loyola, Marx and Hegel; he is cold and unmerciful to mankind, out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness. He is damned always to do that which is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer, in order to abolish slaughtering, to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it--an abstract and geometric love.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.”
― René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

“It’s really kind of… well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know ‘em. We’re all beautiful.”
― Peter Watts, Starfish

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Humans didn't really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it.”
― Annie Proulx, Barkskins

“All must pay the debt of nature.”
― Annie Proulx, Barkskins

“In every life there are events that reshape one's sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed.”
― Annie Proulx, Barkskins

“No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem