Josh > Josh's Quotes

“I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”
― Eduardo Galeano

“...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

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

“...When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occassional cheese dip.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“The Screen decided there’s no such thing as
fall season, reruns, summer replacements or
even blockbusters. For The Screen there is
only what we see now, what we haven’t seen
yet and what we want to see later.”
― Hadji Williams

“No two persons ever read the same book.”
― Edmund Wilson

“...a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...”
― Herbert A. Simon

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

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

“If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.”
― Francois Mauriac

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”
― Robertson Davies

“Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us "throw away" the story once it has been consumed ("devoured"), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere), multiplies it in its variety and its plurality: rereading draws the text out of its internal chronology ("this happens before or after that") and recaptures a mythic time (without before or after); it contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is a primary, naïve, phenomenal reading which we will only, afterwards, have to "explicate," to intellectualize (as if there were a beginning of reading, as if everything were not already read: there is no first reading, even if the text is concerned to give us that illusion by several operations of suspense, artifices more spectacular than persuasive); rereading is no longer consumption, but play (that play which is the return of the different).”
― Roland Barthes

“...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.”
― Anne Fadiman, Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love

“Rereading, we find a new book”
― Mason Cooley

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Trauma waits for stillness.”
― Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt

“Nightmares have seasons like hurricanes.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“Thoughts of leaving will move in, bivouac throughout the living room; they will have eyes like rodents and peer out at you from under the sofa, in the dark, from under the sink, luminous glass beads positioned in twos.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“You will forget whoever it was that said never trust a thought doesn't come while walking. But clutch at it. Apartments can shrink inward like drying ponds.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“We are dealing, she continues, with a mind, as Williams put it, like a bed all made up.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“I am something incorrect: a hair in the cottage cheese. Something uncouth: a fart in the elevator.”
― Lorrie Moore

“The caffeine hits her bloodstream like a dream of another life.”
― Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt

“We say that at home, we can “be ourselves.” Everywhere else, we are someone else. At home, we remove our masks.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Every condition exists,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“But he kept running into the problem that would vex other hot-hand researchers: there was no way to perform a rigorous analysis of the hot hand without coding thousands of hours of basketball. Not even Tversky cared that much about basketball. But Gilovich had read about a compulsive statistician with the Philadelphia 76ers who did, and he hoped this professional dork would be obsessive enough to have the numbers they needed for a proper study of the hot hand.”
― Ben Cohen, The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks

“When we see holes in our theories, or contradictions, or anomalies, we should be bothered by these things rather than trying to explain them away,” he says. That capacity for discomfort is the mark of an honest scientist. Gelman believes that people in his profession have to seek out challenges to their own beliefs. They have to be willing to change their minds.”
― Ben Cohen, The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks

“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“This is why every person knows today, when they or their children are sick, that illness and injury can draw families and communities together.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain