Mark > Mark's Quotes

“A rocker rose like Poseidon and flexed his knuckles.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“He was staring hard, not at his wife and me but at his daughter watching us. In his cold pupil, in the firm twist of his lips, was reflected Madame Miyagi's orgasm reflected in her daughter's gaze.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“There are no metaphysics.”
― Jonathan Lethem

“In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games.”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“I lowered my hands to try to save from disorder the arrangement of the tleaves and flowers; meanwhile, she was also dealing with the branches, leaning forward; and so it happened that at the very moment when one of my hands slipped in confusion between Madame Miyagi's kimono and her bare skin and found itself clasping a soft and warm breast, elongated in form, one of the lady's hands, from among the branches keiyaki [translator's note: in Europe called Caucasian elm], had reached my member and was holding it in a firm, frank grasp, drawing it from my garments as if she were performing the operation of stripping away leaves.”
― Italo Calvino

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" asked the Christian theologian Tertullian... Having received the revealed thruth via Christ, "we want no curious disputation." Well that was then. Today science is so powerful that theologians can't casually dismiss secular knowledge. For most... Athens and Jerusalem must be reconciled or Jerusalem will fall off the map. Philo's thoughtful answer is 'Logos')”
― Robert Wright, The Evolution of God

“She found the page, cleared her throat and began to read, " 'There was nary a doubt that I had ever seen such big ones, round and ripe. My teeth ached to bite them' " God, what tripe! ”
― Johanna Lindsey, Gentle Rogue

“Beg pardon?" I detected large deposits of vanity. Vanity is the softest of bedrocks to sink shafts into.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“Now and then goldfish splish and gleam, like new pennies dropped in water.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do, and that
sight becomes this art.”
― Rumi

“...something ELSE set your body in motion, sent an executive summary - almost an afterthought - to the homunculus behind your eyes ...that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as The person, mistakes correlation for causality," ...and thinks He moved the finger”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a
piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in
twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had one by one,
firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached
Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping
for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now
far, far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and
occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely
defenceless against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together,
in the window. They needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q?
What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which
is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is
only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R
it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he
was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q--R--. Here he knocked
his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the urn,
and proceeded. "Then R ..." He braced himself. He clenched himself.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“The conservatism of a religion—its orthodoxy—is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap. A rising religious movement is all change and experiment—open to new views and techniques from all quarters.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements