Stephen > Stephen's Quotes

“Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.”
― Charles Simic

“Rarely is it possible to study all of the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk of being involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seems to come from nowhere.”
― Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way

“Travel is the only context in which some people ever look around. If we spent half the energy looking at our own neighborhoods, we'd probably learn twice as much.”
― Lucy R. Lippard, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place

“Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.”
― Wendell Berry

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Eroticize intelligence.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts....Practice resurrection.”
― Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage

“There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
― Wendell Berry

“In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week. ”
― Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!

“If you don't know where you're from, you'll have a hard time saying where you're going.”
― Wendell Berry

“Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“Images are ... musical. The way they are put together are musical.”
― Meredith Monk

“...blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos. ”
― Douglas Coupland, All Families are Psychotic

“At times you have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.”
― Alan Alda

“A certain amount of friction is inevitable whenever peoples of different customs and assumptions meet.... What is miraculous is how often it is possible to work together to sustain joint performances in spite of disparate codes, evoking different belief systems to affirm that possibility.”
― Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way

“Physical things are eloquent tokens of ideas,enriched by new meanings through time even when the tokens are no more than evanescent paper representations.”
― Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way

“A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.”
― Steve Martin

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“After the great Impressionists, and again after Van Gogh and Gaugin, people said, 'Painting is now played out.' But Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Roussel and Vuillard appeared and gave them the lie. 'We were wrong,' said the croakers, 'but this at any rate is the end.' Yet to refute them, and to prove that there is no end to art, still another generation of painters sprang up.”
― Ambroise Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer

“Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.”
― Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy

“The one who comes to question himself cares for mankind.”
― Kenneth Patchen

“Unscrew the locks from the doors !
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs ! ”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“All at Once Is What Eternity Is.”
― Kenneth Patchen, Wonderings

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“We shall now seek that which we shall not find.”
― Thomas Malory

“The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“Life is not so idiotically mathematical that only the big eat the small; it is just as common for a bee to kill a lion or at least to drive it mad.”
― August Strindberg, Miss Julie

“God is not ecstatic about the lack you are experiencing; He is not delightful over your failures, He is not happy about your stagnancy.”
― Agu, Jaachynma N.E.