Daniel Villines > Daniel's Quotes

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.”
― Bernard Malamud, Dubin's Lives

“On the morning appointed for her departure Tess awoke before dawn — at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute save for one prophetic bird, who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence, as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.”
― Thomas Hardy

“Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.”
― Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

“One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.”
― Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

“I think Bigfoot is blurry, that's the problem. It's not the photographer's fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that's extra scary to me. There's a large out of focus monster roaming the countryside”
― Mitch Hedburg

“The universe is absurd. People want to make sense of it because we’re hardwired to find reason in the randomness. We look for patterns in the chaos. See omens in coincidence. We look at the random distribution of stars in the sky and pretend they look like animals, call them constellations. For some reason, we want to give meaning to the meaningless. If you go looking for the number eighty-eight, you’ll see it everywhere—the number of keys on a piano, the number of counties in Ohio—but it doesn’t mean anything.”
― James Renner, The Man from Primrose Lane

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.”
― Stephen Colbert

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“But there are times in life when a door opens and you are offered a glimpse of the light on the water, and you know that if you don’t take it, that door slams shut, and maybe forever. Maybe you fool yourself into thinking that you had a choice at all; maybe you were always going to say yes. Maybe refusing was no more a choice than is holding your breath. You were always going to breathe. You were always going to say yes.”
― Graham Joyce, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct.”
― Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd; study of the popular mind

“She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments—these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous.”
― Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests

“I have found God, but he is insufficient.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one. In the very same way, if enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one, and the political class will have to respond, both by making resources available and by bending the free market rules that have proven so pliable when elite interests are in peril.”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

“Blanchet himself turned his attention to the rivers, establishing observation posts on the Chagres, Trinidad, Obispo, and the Río Grande; these were equipped with fluviographs, which confirmed the challenge that the rainy season would bring to the successful construction and running of the canal, with rivers rising 20 feet in as many hours and their rate of discharge increasing overnight from 3,000 to over 60,000 cubic feet per second. By”
― Matthew Parker, Panama Fever: The Epic Story of the Building of the Panama Canal

“What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?...Was ever anything so civil?”
― Anthony Trollope, The Warden

“Man constantly prayed to God for peace, but peace never happened, so he decided that his god must really want war because the other side was sinful. Man invented and extolled virtues which could only be exemplified under conditions of war, like heroism and gallantry and honor, and he gave himself laurel wreaths or booty or medals for such things, thus rewarding himself for behaving well while sinning. He did it when he was a primitive, and he went on with it after he thought he was civilized.”
― Sheri S. Tepper, Raising the Stones

“the gate really is inside each of us. Each of us has a door to walk through, maybe a thousand, and if we don’t walk through them, we aren’t alive. We aren’t human until we walk through that gate regardless of what’s on the other side.”
― S.G. Redling, Damocles

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“An unedified palate is the irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart. The”
― Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes

“It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”
― Carl Sagan

“[Lieutenant Fitzpatrick] would not have dared to make a gesture of reconciliation towards his friend [Seaman Warrington], nor speak the word that would have launched them...on one of the old conversations. Neither could Warrington have made the gesture or spoken the word...The very stress between them, largely monopolizing his emotions and reflections, was, in its polarization, a misery rich in significance, as rich, in that sense, as their harmony had been. Like the officer, if he could not restore the harmony, he clung to the conflict that still bound them. However, the striking think was not that they clung to the only bond that still seemed possible to them; but that they both actually seemed to be striving to protect and preserve, surviving carefully and with a kind of cold desperation, the framework of their quarrel as such.”
― Marcus Goodrich, Delilah

“It was leap and die or live and be haunted by the ability to choose. Which when I think about it, might be one definition of consciousness. I pitied just about everybody.”
― Peter Heller, The Painter

“Don Pepe was a Mexican man: a fatalist. He meant to impart much more than comfort. He meant that all good things would also end. All joy would crumble. And death would visit each and every one of them. He meant that regimes and ancient orders and cultures would all collapse. The world as we know it becomes a new world overnight.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, Into the Beautiful North

“This business of living for eternity certainly contributed to capital punishment, brutality, and war.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song