Matthew > Matthew's Quotes

“Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“مهما كانت الديانة التى بيدها مقاليد الأمور، فسوف تتفتق دائماً وأبداً عن لاتسامح. وسيولد من رحمها محاكم التفتيش وتخرج علينا أعضاء طالبان.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Avendesora,” Moiraine murmured, resting her hand on a trefoil leaf in the stonework. Rand scanned the carving; that was the only leaf of its kind he could find. “The leaf of the Tree of Life is the key,” the Aes Sedai said, and the leaf came away in her hand.”
― Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World

“Practice is not about overcoming human problems. It’s not about becoming serene and transcendent. It’s about embracing our lives as they really are, and understanding at every point how deep and profound and gorgeous everything is—even the suffering, even the difficulty. So we forgive ourselves for our limitations, and we forgive this world for its pain. We don’t say, “That’s not pain.” It is pain. You don’t say, “It’s not difficulty.” It is difficult. But when we embrace the difficulty… we see this is exactly the difficulty we need, and this difficulty is the most beautiful and poignant thing in this world. — Zoketsu Norman Fischer”
― Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement

“Now all my teachers are dead except silence. —W.S. Merwin”
― Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement

“Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. —WERNHER VON BRAUN”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“If patterns of ones and zeros were “like” patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least—an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being’s name—its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in God’s computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune, And the only thing we’re good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Vineland

“Then again, it’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it—dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity—‘I don’t like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Vineland

“The burden of proof, Elmhurst explained, would be reversed here—to get his property back, Zoyd would first have to prove his innocence. “What about ‘innocent till proven guilty’?” “That was another planet, think they used to call it America, long time ago, before the gutting of the Fourth Amendment. You were automatically guilty the minute they found that marijuana growing on your land.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Vineland

“Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?— in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow’d Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever ’tis not yet mapp’d, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,— serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,— Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ’s Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur’d and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,— winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

“Who are they,” inquires the Revd in his Day-Book, “that will send violent young troops against their own people? Their mouths ever keeping up the same weary Rattle about Freedom, Toleration, and the rest, whilst their own Land is as Occupied as ever it was by Rome. These forces look like Englishmen, they were born in England, they speak the language of the People flawlessly, they cheerfully eat jellied Eels, joints of Mutton, Treacle-Tarts, all that vile unwholesome Diet which maketh the involuntary American more than once bless his Exile,— yet their intercourse with the Mass of the People is as cold with suspicion and contempt, as that of any foreign invader.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

“the Fourth of December, feast of St. Barbara, patron saint of artillerymen, gunsmiths, and by not that big of a stretch, dynamiters too.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

“No, I meant late capitalism is a pyramid racket on a global scale, the kind of pyramid you do human sacrifices up on top of, meantime getting the suckers to believe it’s all gonna go on forever.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge