Patrick > Patrick's Quotes

“The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.”
― Italo Calvino

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Nothing is always absolutely so”
― Theodore Sturgeon

“90% of everything is crap.”
― Theodore Sturgeon

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison

“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.”
― Harlan Ellison

“For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.”
― John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids

“Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West