Crystal > Crystal's Quotes

“People who truly love us can be divided into two categories: those who understand us, and those who forgive us our worst sins. Rarely do you find someone capable of both.”
― Jonathan Carroll

“Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art”
― Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Four: 1931-1935

“Be so good they can't ignore you.”
― Steve Martin

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.”
― Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Post-Industrial Society

“Deprived of bread or the equal benefits of the commonwealth, the person shrivels. Obviously. And that is a clear line to fight on. But when the transcendent energies waste away, then too the person shrivels--though far less obviously. Their loss is suffered in privacy and bewildered silence; it is easily submerged in affluence, entertaining diversions, and adjustive therapy. Well fed and fashionably dressed, surrounded by every manner of mechanical convenience and with our credit rating in good order, we may even be ashamed to feel we have any problem at all.”
― Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends

“His generation believed that if there was trouble all you'd have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“One day, he said that what you had to do in any adversarial situation was to kill the king, as in chess. I said people didn't have kings any more. He said he meant the centre of power, but today it wouldn't be a single person, it would be the technological connections.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“She'd learned a lot of things from Zeb in his Urban Bloodshed Limitation classes: in Zeb's view, the first bloodshed to be limited should be your own.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Imagining God can be so different from wishful thinking, if your spiritual experiences change your behavior over time. Have you become more generous, which is the ultimate healing? Or more patient, which is a close second? Did your world become bigger and juicier and more tender? Have you become ever so slightly kinder to yourself? This is how you tell.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Faced with a totally controlled, monitored and owned online world, in which every utterance is immediately scanned and filed away, many have yet to make the connection that the best solution may not be running Tor and eighteen proxies, but writing things down on paper and talking face-to-face. Remember the mail? Remember conversations? Yeah, those still exist. Want to shake somebody out of their online trance? Send them a letter. Send them art. Want to record something that will last longer than a few seconds on Facebook or Twitter? Write a book. The physical world didn’t go anywhere. In fact, physical artifacts and experiences have only grown in totemic power the more we’ve pushed them away.”
― Jason Louv, Hyperworlds, Underworlds

“The image of the “self-destructive artist” is a culturally implanted kill switch. Ignore it. Imagination is a weapon; you have been indoctrinated with these images so that if you discover the weapon, you will use it on yourself and save them the trouble.”
― Jason Louv, Hyperworlds, Underworlds

“It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“Even Henry and Caroline, whom she saw every day, were half hidden under their accumulations--accumulations of prosperity, authority, daily experience. They were carpeted with experience. No new event could set jarring feet on them but they would absorb and muffle the impact. If the boiler burst, if a policeman climbed in at the window waving a sword, Henry and Caroline would bring the situation to heel by their massive experience of normal boilers and normal policemen.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner

“Laura was not in any way religious. She was not even religious enough to speculate towards irreligion.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“Laura also thought that the law had done a great deal to spoil Henry. It had changed his natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating indifference to other people's point of view. He seemed to consider himself briefed by his Creator to turn into ridicule the opinions of those who disagreed with him, and to attribute dishonesty, idiocy, or a base motive to every one who supported a better case than he.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“The night was at her disposal. She might walk back to Great Mop and arrive very late; or she might sleep out and not trouble to arrive till to-morrow. Whichever she did Mrs Leak would not mind. That was one of the advantages of dealing with witches; they do not mind if you are a little odd in your ways, frown if you are late for meals, fret if you are out all night, pry and commiserate when at length you return. Lovely to be with people who prefer their thoughts to yours, lovely to live at your own sweet will, lovely to sleep out all night!”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you aren’t afraid of dying, there is nothing you can’t achieve. Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place. When you handle the master carpenter’s tools, chances are that you’ll cut yourself.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“Dan nodded emphatically, as if his mouth had just uttered, independently, something that his ears found quite profound.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“The great breakthrough of our age is supposed to be that we measure success by happiness, admiring a man for how much he enjoyed his life, rather than how much wealth or fame he hoarded, that old race with no finish line. Diogenes with his barrel and his sunlight lived every hour of his life content, while Alexander fought and bled, mourned friends, faced enemies, and died unsatisfied. Diogenes is greater. Or does that past-tainted inner part of you—the part that still parses ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and ‘he’ and ‘she’—still think that happiness alone is not achievement without legacy? Diogenes has a legacy. Diogenes ruled nothing, wrote nothing, taught nothing except by the example of his life to passersby, but, so impressed were those bypassers, that, after the better part of three millennia, we still know this about him.”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“The initial shooting that led to the conflict was itself a farce. The assassin in question was a Yugoslav nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. He had given up in his attempt to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria following a failed grenade attack by Princip’s colleague, and gone to a café. It is often said that he got himself a sandwich, which would surely have been the most significant sandwich in history, but it seems more likely that he was standing outside the café without any lunch. By sheer coincidence the Archduke’s driver made a wrong turn into the same street and stalled the car in front of him. This gave a surprised Princip the opportunity to shoot Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Over 37 million people died in the fallout from that assassination.”
― J.M.R. Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

“As the old Russian joke goes, capitalism was the exploitation of man by man, whereas communism was the reverse.”
― J.M.R. Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

“Greer recognised that the direction the sexual revolution was taking was not in the interests of women. “Sex must be rescued from the traffic between powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered, sexual and neutral, to become a form of communication between potent, gentle, tender people,” she wrote.”
― J.M.R. Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

“The pre-Thatcher state had functioned on the understanding that there was such a thing as society. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic had tried to find a workable middle ground between the laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth century and the new state communism of Russia or China. They had had some success in this project, from President Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s to the establishment of the UK’s welfare state during Prime Minister Attlee’s postwar government. The results may not have been perfect, but they were better than the restricting homogeny of life in the communist East, or the poverty and inequality of Victorian Britain. They resulted in a stable society where democracy could flourish and the extremes of political totalitarianism were unable to gain a serious hold. What postwar youth culture was rebelling against may indeed have been dull, and boring, and square. It may well have been a terminal buzz kill. But politically and historically speaking, it really wasn’t the worst.”
― J.M.R. Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

“American Christianity did not undergo the church-emptying declines of European Christianity. Its perspective was similar to that of Mother Teresa, who in 1988 said, “Why should we care about the Earth when our duty is to the poor and the sick among us? God will take care of the Earth.” Here God is the “big man” of the tribe who offers protection in return for service. Accepting that the climate could spiral into chaos is accepting that such protection does not exist. This makes working to prevent climate change ideologically problematic.”
― J.M.R. Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

“In the wake of primitive accumulation, the wage relationship became a seemingly voluntary affair. Workers needed employment and employers wanted workers. In reality, of course, the underlying process was far from voluntary.”
― Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation

“Indeed, the history of the recruitment of labor is an uninterrupted story of coercion either through the brute force of poverty or more direct regulation, which made a continuation of the old ways impossible”
― Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation