Paul > Paul's Quotes

“The astonishing thing is that some people are good, and that many others try to be.”
― Katherine Boo

“If a story seems too random, or perhaps too brilliant, for a "madman" to have conceived of it himself, then consider that the "author" might be reality and the "madman" just the reader. After all, only reality can escape the limits of our imagination.”
― Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances

“The Massachusetts elite had read everything in sight, some of it too closely. As would be said of logic-loving Ipswich minister John Wise, those men were not so much the masters as the victims of learning. They had read and reread bushels of witchcraft texts. They parsed legal code. They knew their history. They worked in the sterling name of reason.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“All thoughts of revenge are born of the pain of helplessness. 'I suffer' becomes 'You will suffer'. And let us not lie: Vengeance is invigorating. It focuses and enlivens us, and it quashes grief because it turns the emotion outward. In grief we go to pieces. In revenge we come together as a single pointed weapon aimed at a target. However destructive in the long run, it serves a useful purpose for a time”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World

“Beware O wanderer, the road is walking too.”
― Jim Harrison

“Why not have it.”
― Howell Raines

“Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.”
― Karen Armstrong

“Live, don't know how long,
And die, don't know when;
Must go, don't know where;
I am astonished I am so cheerful.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water

“Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“I do believe that we stand at a threshold, as Bonhoeffer did, and that the example of his life obliges me to speak about the gravity of our historical moment as I see it, in the knowledge that no society is at any time immune to moral catastrophe.”
― Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays

“Every time I write, say, or think "lung cancer," I pick up a Pall Mall to calm myself.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“Don't write about ideas ... write about convictions of the heart.”
― Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters

“Suffering led the Buddha to enlightenment, and it may cause us, against our will, to grow in compassion, awareness, and possibly eventually peace.”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“I am a religious man without a religion. I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence . . . call it God if you like. I believe there is a bond between myself and this God who is bound with the cosmos. But I also believe it to be a fact that we shall never know, we shall never penetrate into the mystery of life. That's a thing you've got to accept, and in that sense I am religious . . . the important thing is that man should never lose sight of his link with the universe. Life is a miracle. For me, everything is mystery and miracle.”
― Henry Miller

“To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Kafka understood that travel, sex, and books are paths that lead nowhere except to the loss of the self, and yet they must be followed and the self must be lost, in order to find it again, or to find something, whatever it may be - a book, an expression, a misplaced object - in order to find anything at all, a method, perhaps, and, with a bit of luck, the "new," which has been there all along.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“The sole purpose of all the other work was just to buy time to be still for a moment and write.”
― Rick Bass, The Traveling Feast: On the Road and at the Table with My Heroes

“We are part of this ultimate reality and by nature we participate in eternal things--justice, truth, compassion, love. We have a vision of these things we have not arrived at by reason, have rarely learned from experience, and have not found in history. We feel the lack. Hope leads us toward them.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“It's strange that we still believe in inspiration when, compared to earlier ages, we seem to believe in so little. Inspiration may be the one bit of God we haven't managed to kill off.”
― Patricia Hampl, Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime

“God is the partner of our most intimate soliloquies. That is to say, whenever you are talking to yourself in utmost sincerity and ultimate solitude--he to whom you are addressing yourself may justifiably be called God.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning

“. . . it will have helped us to feel that we have behaved decently till the end . . . we all acted alone, we were all caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that doesn't mean that we are alone, Quangel, or that our deaths will be in vain.”
― Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone

“The mainstream reader knows what he wants, and that is entertainment with a veneer of "the real," the challenge of a problem that he can solve, a soupcon of flattery, and a dollop of sex (just as long as it's grey). What such a reader doesn't want is an invitation to change his life, or a clear exposition of how rotten the system is, a la Henry Miller, because as my friend says, that is depressing. To write outside the mainstream, to diagnose the system's ills, to lay your heart and your spirit out on the page, is lonely work, but it feels lonelier still to think you did it all for nothing.”
― John Burnside

“....even the professor, in his quietest moments alone, would wonder at least briefly what things might have been like the Tuesday before the Big Bang. Even he realizes in his bones that you can never get something from nothing, and that the Big Bang is no explanation at all for the origins of everything but merely, at best, the partial description of a single event in a continuum that is probably timeless.”
― Robert Lanza MD

“Those who search for happiness do not find it because they do not understand that the object of the search is the seeker.”
― Alan Watts, The Meaning of Happiness: The Quest for Freedom of the Spirit in Modern Psychology and the Wisdom of the East

“To regard the Milagros there as evidence of superstition, or to describe these out-of-the-way chapels as backwards, seems to me to dismiss what it means to be human, which is to live in fear in a world in which one's destiny is never entirely of one's choosing.”
― Barry Lopez

“There are two eyes in the human head--the eye of mystery, and the eye of harsh truth--the hidden and the open--the woods eye and the prairie eye. The prairie eye looks for distance, clarity, and light; the woods eye for closeness, complexity, and darkness. The prairie eye looks for usefulness and plainness in art and architecture, the woods eye for the baroque and ornamental. Dark old brownstones on Summit Avenue were created by a woods eye; the square white farmhouse and red barn are prairie eye's work.”
― Bill Holm, Prairie Days

“Three plagues, three contagions, threaten the world.
The first is the plague of nationalism.
The second is the plague of racism.
The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.
All three share one trait, a common denominator--an aggressive, all-powerful, total irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that awaits its sacrificial victims.”
― Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium

“For some reason we want to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don't care to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each days before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn't one I've been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next one, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real.”
― Tom Hennen, Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems

“A horse can't endure even a month of the local winter life in a cold stall if it's worked hard hours in subzero weather. . . . But man lives on. Perhaps he lives by virtue of his hopes? But he doesn't have any hope . . . . . He is saved by a drive for self-preservation, a tenacious clinging to life, a physical tenacity to which his entire consciousness is subordinated. He lives on the same things as a bird or a dog, but he clings more strongly to life than they do. He has a greater endurance than that of any animal.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured as the millionth part of a millimetre. When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm to no one. I cannot think of any tiny good things to do at the moment, but perhaps I shall think of one tomorrow.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea