Liam Porter > Liam's Quotes

“I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.”
― George Orwell

“I visit the orchards of God and look at the spheric product
And look at quintillions ripened, and look at quintillions green.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“I've come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be — in their current incarnation, at least — is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority.”
― Alan Moore

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“Enough already of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault poured like ketchup over everything. Lacan: the French fog machine; a grey-flannel worry-bone for toothless academic pups; a twerpy, cape-twirling Dracula dragging his flocking stooges to the crypt. Lacan is a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teeny-weeny Saussure torso. The entire school of Saussure, inluding Levi-Strauss, write their muffled prose of people with cotton wool wrapped around their heads; they're like walking Q-tips. Derrida: a Gloomy Gus one-trick pony, stuck on a rhetorical trope already available in the varied armory of New Criticism. Derrida's method: masturbating without pleasure. It's a birdbrain game for birdseed stakes. Neo-Foucaldian New Historicism: a high-wax bowling alley where you score points just by knockng down the pins.”
― Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays

“He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.”
― Francis Bacon

“Sometimes there is a microcosm and a macrocosm, and if you're dyslexic like me you can't tell the difference.”
― Bruce Bickford

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“Our names were made for us in another century.”
― Richard Brautigan

“Step out of a triangle, into striped light!”
― Captain Beefheart

“Waiters are seldom socialists.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“Though waiters always die poor, they have long runs of luck occasionally.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“If you fulfill your obligations everyday you don't need to worry about the future.”
― Jordan Peterson

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.
I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I though, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“A friend is a gift you give yourself.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“I am blind -- but I am able to read thanks to a wonderful new system known as 'broil' . . . I'm sorry, I'll just feel that again.”
― Peter Cook

“Quoi, c'était à cette chévite créature que ses pareils et lui obéssaient depuis des siècles ? Alors qu'un temps de galop suffisait à le distancer, une morsure à le mutiler, une ruade à l'étendre mort ! Sans le cuir et le fer, qu'est-ce que l'homme ?”
― Gilbert Cesbron, Tout dort et je veille