Patrick Brown > Patrick's Quotes

“We learn to make a shell for ourselves when we are young and then spend the rest of our lives hoping for someone to reach inside and touch us. Just touch us—anything more than that would be too much for us to bear.”
― Bill Russell

“It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right. ”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Some Hope: A Trilogy

“As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own — they even, for God’s sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, ‘I want to raise some questions about so-and-so’, and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys.”
― David Lodge

“There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“To read without joy is stupid.”
― John Williams

“The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“My swag was phenomenal.”
― Gilbert Arenas

“Several of the girls at the party had had sex, something which sounded appealing but only if it could happen with blindfolds in a time warp plus amnesia”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.”
― Louis L'Amour, Matagorda/The First Fast Draw: Two Novels in One Volume

“So much of one's life was spent reading; it made sense not to do it alone.”
― Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“He hasn’t realized yet that you can’t outrun this game. There is no clock, there are only outs, and outs are precious things. As long as you have outs, you have life.”
― Matthew Callan, Hang A Crooked Number

“Building stuff was an ethical act, a way to become more fully human.”
― Jason Fagone, Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring, and the Race to Revive America

“Ford convinced the American public to believe in gasoline cars. And then Ford became Ford, and America became America.”
― Jason Fagone, Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring, and the Race to Revive America

“The world is made of stuff and that stuff behaves in certain predictable ways; if you master the rules, you master the stuff.”
― Jason Fagone, Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring, and the Race to Revive America

“Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries