Jason > Jason's Quotes

“Faith in faith' he answered himself. 'It isn't necessary to have something to believe in. It's only necessary to believe that somewhere there's something worthy of belief.”
― Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination

“No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“Death is at all times solemn, but never so much so as at sea,” one sailor recalled. “The man is near you—at your side—you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss….There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night watch is mustered. There is one less to take the wheel, and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“I must no longer accept,” she said slowly, “being a stranger to you.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“People aren’t poor because they make bad choices. They make bad choices because they’re poor.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“The whole point of extravagance is to act like a fool and feel like a fool, but enjoy it.”
― Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination

“Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there’s but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

“Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. "Slow" works in an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“The authors rarely depicted themselves or their companions as the agents of an imperialist system. They were consumed with their own daily struggles and ambitions—with working the ship, with gaining promotions and securing money for their families, and, ultimately, with survival. But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving—and even sacrificing themselves for—a system many of them rarely question.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you...”
― Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination

“But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“It pleased him to imagine God as someone like his mother, someone beleagured by too many responsibilities, too dog-tired to monitor an energetic boy every minute of the day, but who, out of love and fear for his safety, checked in on him whenever she could. Was this so crazy? ...Miles liked the idea of a God who, when He at last had the oppotunity to return His attention to His children, might shake His head with wonder and mutter, "Jesus. Look what they're up to now." A distractible God, perhaps, one who'd be startled to discover so many of His children way up in trees since the last time He looked. A God whose hand would go rushing to His mouth in fear in that instant of recognition that - good God! - that kid's going to hurt himself. A God who could be surprised by unanticipated pride - glory be, that boy is a climber!”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
― Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices

“It is better to be a dissatisfied human being than a satisfied pig.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

“For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more. And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have.”
― John Steinbeck, The Pearl

“The story was the price you paid for the rhythm.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“Doesn't have to be useful,' my mother pressed. 'Art means not having to be useful! In West Africa, for example, a hundred years ago, there were some village women, they were making these strangely shaped pots, impractical pots, and the anthropologists couldn't understand what they were doing, but that was because, they, the scientists, were expecting a quote unquote "primitive" people to make only useful things, when actually they were making the pots just for their beauty - no different from a sculptor - no to collect water, not to hold grain, just for their beauty, and to say: we were here, at this moment in time, and this is what we made.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“It takes a sour woman to make a good pickle.”
― Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“Oh my God — Fern — please! Stop talking like that! I don’t want your heart! I don’t want to be responsible for anybody else’s heart. For anybody else’s anything!'

He looked confused: 'A peculiar idea. Once you’re alive in this world, you’re responsible.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“So far as I understood the British Empire, other people’s countries were useful or negligible but rarely conceived of as autonomous. The empire regarded the world the way my dad regards the elastic bands the post deliverer drops on their round: This is handy, it’s just lying here; now it’s mine.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“You don't get any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaffolding of your oppression. You'll find the weak joints, the things you can kick in.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time