Robb > Robb's Quotes

“Language is a piss poor attempt at telepathy is what it is. We try to put our thoughts into each other's heads through language...But half the intended meaning gets lost in the transmission, and the other half is filtered through existing assumptions. Everything is a half truth!

That's the whole problem! You can't understand me through the smog of your presumptions and prejudices. Multiply that six billion times and you'll begin to understand the desperation of our global situation”
― Tony Vigorito, Just A Couple Of Days: The Cult Classic American Novel Where a Virus Destroys Language

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“If you want to make a million you don't have to understand money, what you have to understand is people's fears about money”
― William Gaddis, J R

“It would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level, at least -- an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name -- its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to sort of a standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Vineland

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in our real lives, we know very little about our parents as they were before our birth; we have only fragmentary knowledge of the people close to us: we see them come and go and scarcely have they vanished than their place is taken over by others: they form a long line of replaceable beings. Only the novel separates out an individual, trains a light on his biography, his ideas, his feelings, makes him irreplaceable: makes him the center of everything.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“(God) being the old man invented in order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Isn't that exactly the definition of biography? An artificial logic imposed on an 'incoherent succession of images'?”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“That's how it is: even in the throes of death, man is always on stage. And even 'the plainest' of them, the least exhibitionist, because it's not always the man himself who climbs on stage. If he doesn't do it, someone will put him there. That is his fate as a man.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“Every man lives by exchanging.”
― Adam Smith

“That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“She begins to feel that the reality show is the university she never attended. Vicarious reality. Emotion without a value-added tax. Movement without danger. Alma finds her reality. She no longer has a reason to put herself at risk and go out into the hostile, degrading world.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Todas las familias felices

“In regards to the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates as simple interest does, the rise of profit operates like compound interest.

Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“Alessandra approached the geniuses of the past to give them life with her attention, which was the form her affection took: paying attention.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Todas las familias felices

“Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Todas las familias felices

“No, it's not that they're bad. It's that they're obliged to pretend they're good. They've been brought up to deceive and be cunning, to protect themselves from our society. I don't want to be like that.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Todas las familias felices

“a statement by Bertrand Russell ... embodies the tone of heroic denunciation that you can muster only if you have drunk deeply from the cup of your own oracular majesty”
― David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise

“To get the most attention, the essay should be wrong. Logical essays are read and understood. But an illogical or wrong essay will prompt dozens of other writers to rise and respond, thus giving the author mounds of publicity.”
― David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise