Mark Brown > Mark's Quotes

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

“Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent.”
― Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

“Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening.”
― Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“We never get over our fathers, and we’re not required to. (Irish Proverb)”
― Martin Sheen, Along the Way: The Journey of a Father and Son

“We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; merely in different rooms.”
― Paolo Coelho Aleph

“The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.”
― Edward Abbey

“Blíndur er bóklaus ma∂ur. Blind is a man without a book.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“I always say—a prejudice on my part, I'm sure—you can tell a lot about a person's character from his choice of sofa. Sofas constitute a realm inviolate unto themselves.
This, however, is something that only those who have grown up sitting on good sofas will appreciate. It's like growing up reading good books or listening to good music. One good sofa breeds another good sofa; one bad sofa breeds another bad sofa. That's how it goes.
There are people who drive luxury cars, but have only second- or third-rate sofas in their homes. I put little trust in such people. An expensive automobile may well be worth its price, but it's only an expensive automobile. If you have the money, you can buy it, anyone can buy it. Procuring a good sofa, on the other hand, requires style and experience and philosophy. It takes money, yes, but you also need a vision of the superior sofa. That sofa among sofas.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
― T.S. Eliot, The Rock

“And whatever route fortune gives, we shall follow alone. - Virgil”
― Jules Verne

“I suppose a room is the summation of all that has happened inside it.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
― Mary Oliver

“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“Doing better next time. That’s what life is.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The First Law Trilogy

“But some things have to be done. It’s better to do them, than to live with the fear of them.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The First Law Trilogy

“More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The First Law Trilogy Boxed Set: The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, Last Argument of Kings

“Life is the misery we endure between dissappointments”
― Joe Abercrombie, The First Law Trilogy

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked