Brian > Brian's Quotes

“Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“Work will drive you crazy if you let it.”
― Patrick deWitt, Ablutions

“I will admit he is unusual, but that is perhaps the closest I could come to complimenting him.”
― Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers

“Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Fact One: Races are won or lost in key moments. Fact Two: Success in the sport is, above all else, about enduring suffering.”
― Chris McCormack, I'm Here To Win: A World Champion's Advice for Peak Performance

“The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Plus, if you’re a copycat, you can never keep up. You’re always in a passive position. You never lead; you always follow. You give birth to something that’s already behind the times—just a knockoff, an inferior version of the original. That’s no way to live.”
― Jason Fried, Rework

“Hip-hop has always been controversial, and for good reason. When you watch a children's show and they've got a muppet rapping about the alphabet, it's cool, but it's not really hip-hop. The music is meant to be provocative - which doesn't mean it's necessarily obnoxious, but it is (mostly) confrontational, and more than that, it's dense with multiple meanings. Great rap should have all kinds of unresolved layers that you don't necessarily figure out the first time you listen to it. Instead it plants dissonance in your head. You can enjoy a song that knocks in the club or has witty punch lines the first time you hear it. But great rap retains mystery. It leaves shit rattling around in your head that won't make sense till the fifth or sixth time through. It challenges you.

Which is the other reason hip-hop is controversial: People don't bother trying to get it. The problem isn't in the rap or the rapper or the culture. The problem is that so many people don't even know how to listen to the music.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“The music is meant to be provocative—which doesn’t mean it’s necessarily obnoxious, but it is (mostly) confrontational, and more than that, it’s dense with multiple meanings. Great rap should have all kinds of unresolved layers that you don’t necessarily figure out the first time you listen to it. Instead it plants dissonance in your head. You can enjoy a song that knocks in the club or has witty punch lines the first time you hear it. But great rap retains mystery. It leaves shit rattling around in your head that won’t make sense till the fifth or sixth time through. It challenges you.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority.”
― Alex Ross, Listen to This

“Music, together with certain sorts of majestic landscape, had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches about the nature of the universe. It was all nonsense. Her tears had been no different from the ones people cried at sentimental television commercials. They represented nothing but a momentary and regrettable submission to kitsch.”
― Zoe Heller