Gary > Gary's Quotes

“During an illustrative lunch at one of the restaurants, a Rego Park deli called Ben’s Best Kosher Delicatessan, which is known for its pastrami, Matsil asked the owner, Jay Parker, the original Ben’s son, a white-haired, trim man who had just returned from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, what he thought of the QueensWay. “I love it, it’s a no-brainer,” he said. “It’s like bingo. You can put bingo in a Catholic church, a Jewish synagogue, a Muslim mosque, a Buddhist temple—doesn’t matter. Bingo works for everybody, QueensWay works for everybody.”
― Jay Parker

“Henry Adams: “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“As an old friend of mine once said when I brought him some interesting brownies, ‘You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes,’” she replied. “Haven’t you read your Maimonides?”
― Gregory Maguire, Egg & Spoon

“But they did eventually set off, with walking sticks and bundles on their backs, on a bright morning of wispy white clouds and a strong breeze.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

“Is right that ugly plastic statue of Paul Bunyan in front of City Center? Oh, if I had a truckful of napalm and my old Zippo lighter I’d take care of that fucking thing, I assure you . . .”
― Stephen King, It

“Interested citizens could follow a lady from the Historical Society up the spiral of stairs to the gallery at the top, where they could ooh and aah over the view and snap Kodaks to show their friends.”
― Stephen King, It

“To be free, above all, was to be free from enslavement to one’s own basest desires, which could never be fulfilled, and the pursuit of which could only foster ceaseless craving and discontent.”
― Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

“Concluding that democracy was indefensible—for reasons similar to those suggested by Brennan, Caplan, Friedman, and others—Shepard urged his fellow political scientists to disabuse themselves of their unjustified faith in the public: the electorate “must lose the halo which has surrounded it. . . . The dogma of universal suffrage must give way to a system of educational and other tests which will exclude the ignorant, the uninformed, and the anti-social elements which hitherto have so frequently controlled elections.”7 Even John Dewey, who had once declared his own “democratic faith,” in a long debate with Walter Lippmann acknowledged that the public was unlikely to be able to rise to the level of civic knowledge and competence demanded in a period of ever more complexity, and suggested that Whitman-like poets would be needed to provide a suitable and accessible “presentation” of the complex political and scientific information needed by the citizenry of a complex modern society.8”
― Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

“Tocqueville concluded that “the strength of free peoples resides in the local community. Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science: they put it within the people’s reach; they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it.”26 He stressed that it was the nearness and immediacy of the township that made its citizens more likely to care and take an active interest not only in their own fates but in the shared fates of their fellow citizens. By contrast, he noted a striking lack of attentiveness to more distant political centers of power, including both state and an even more distant federal government, where only a few ambitious men might govern but which otherwise was of little concern to the active citizens within the township. Tocqueville would have regarded a citizenry that was oblivious to local self-governance, but which instead directed all its attention and energy to the machinations of a distant national power, not as the culmination of democracy but as its betrayal.”
― Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

“Kierkegaard’s most remarkable and subtle observations, that life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards. I think it means you have to turn around and start walking backwards, facing the past, if the present is going to make any sense at all.”
― Robert Ferguson, Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North

“Still others prefer the idea that the design reflects the same sort of syncretic instincts that led the makers to transform the Christian lion into a Scandinavian horse and the Christian snake into the world-encircling Midgard serpent of Æsir mythology, offering familiarity as an enticement to acceptance in much the same way as designers of the first railway carriages in the nineteenth century deliberately designed them to look like horse-drawn wagons so that people would dare to step on board.”
― Robert Ferguson, Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North

“You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers.” Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion. (Partly for this reason Richards believes that psychedelics should be part of a divinity student’s education.) And third, that consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains. On this question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it. “If you wanted to find the blonde who delivered the news last night,” Richards offered by way of an analogy, “you wouldn’t look for her in the TV set.” The television set is, like the human brain, necessary but not sufficient.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“FRANK BIDART Song of the Mortar and Pestle The desire to approach obliteration preexists each metaphysic justifying it. Watch him fucked want to get fucked hard. Christianity allowed the flagellants light, for even Jesus found release from flesh requires mortification of the flesh. From the ends of the earth the song is, Grind me into dust.”
― Stephen Burt, The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them

“The same phenomenon that pointed to a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a nonmaterial reality—the very basis of religious belief.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“I myself am identical with nature.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

“Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“The sole substitute for an experience we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn