Benjamin Gorman > Benjamin's Quotes

“Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.”
― Laurie Anderson

“I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water.”
― Harlan Ellison

“Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michaelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.”
― Pablo Casals

“You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky

“A child that is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth”
― African Proverb

“There’s more.”

“Of course there is,” Brishen said flatly. It had started badly; it turned worse and hinted at becoming ruinous.”
― Grace Draven, Eidolon

“I got an A on the third quiz in American history,
an A,
dammit.
Last time I got a B
up from a C
and my father said,
"if you can get a C
you can get a B,
if you can get a B
you can get an A."-
I got an A
and my father said,
"grades don't mean anything.”
― Thalia Chaltas, Because I Am Furniture