Sam > Sam's Quotes

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.”
― George Orwell

“And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
― Ecclesiastes

“Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally. Not “if only.” Not “as long as.” I matter equally. Full stop.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it.”
― Edith Wharton

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
― Rebecca West

“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.”
― Philip José Farmer

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul.
To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.”
― Henrik Johan Ibsen, Peer Gynt

“ The Lake Isle

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of writing,
where one needs one’s brains all the time.”
― Ezra Pound

“Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?'"
"The mood will pass, sir.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters