John > John's Quotes

“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.”
― Margaret Atwood

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”
― Margaret Atwood

“There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”
― Margaret Atwood , Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Do your thing and don't care if they like it.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“Indeed, your biggest challenge may be to fully harness your strengths. You may be so busy trying to appear like a zestful, reward-sensitive extrovert that you undervalue your own talents, or feel underestimated by those around you. But when you’re focused on a project that you care about, you probably find that your energy is boundless.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Húrin

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“You can only come to the morning through the shadows.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“The cause-effect sequences in our brains are just as determining, just as inescapable, as anywhere else in Nature.”
― Corliss Lamont

“The tragedy of contemporary philosophy is that it has been castrated.”
― Paul Kurtz

“The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.”
― Bertrand Russell

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Ninguna persona que merece tus lagrimas. Y quien las merezcas no te hara llorar.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“It is a common error to assume that the lack of a formal education means that shoemakers, weavers, peasants or indigenous peoples cannot be intellectuals. We may even find it difficult to believe that they could acquire a significant book collection, let alone be interested in or engage in philosophy or pass on proper knowledge, not just ‘culture’ or ‘traditions,’ to others. Such a misunderstanding excludes many people from history because it assumes they can have no impact on history, or even be affected by it.
Story of a Death Foretold: The Coup Against Salvador Allende, September 11, 1973”
― Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Story of a Death Foretold: The Coup Against Salvador Allende, September 11, 1973

“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”
― Robert Frost

“Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. We can only hope religion changes its commitment to nonsense.”
― Victor J. Stenger

“On ne découvre pas de terre nouvelle sans consentir à perdre de vue, d'abord et longtemps, tout rivage.

(One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.)”
― André Gide, The Counterfeiters

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
― Louis L'Amour

“Philosophy and hunger: quite a combination.”
― Dawid Sierakowiak, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto

“Most significantly, the act exempted credit unions from the Community Reinvestment Act, an act aimed at providing banking access to low-income individuals.54 The exemption resulted directly from credit union lobbying. To repeat, the credit union industry, created to serve the poor, now fought against a law requiring it to serve the poor.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy

“It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood,
A beautiful day for a neighbor.
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?...

It's a neighborly day in this beauty wood,
A neighborly day for a beauty.
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?...

I've always wanted to have a neighbor just like you.
I've always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you.

So, let's make the most of this beautiful day.
Since we're together we might as well say:
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?
Won't you be my neighbor?

Won't you please,
Won't you please?
Please won't you be my neighbor?”
― Fred Rogers