Andy > Andy's Quotes

“I’ve experienced all kinds of discrimination,” Oshima says. “Only people who’ve been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I’m as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they’re doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don’t want to. Like that lovely pair we just met.” He sighs and twirls the long slender pencil in his hand. “Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas—none of them bother me. I don’t care what banner they raise. But what I can’t stand are hollow people. When I’m with them I just can’t bear it, and wind up saying things I shouldn’t. With those women—I should’ve just let it slide, or else called Miss Saeki and let her handle it. She would have given them a smile and smoothed things over. But I just can’t do that. I say things I shouldn’t, do things I shouldn’t do. I can’t control myself. That’s one of my weak points. Do you know why that’s a weak point of mine?” “’Cause if you take every single person who lacks much imagination seriously, there’s no end to it,” I say. “That’s it,” Oshima says. He taps his temple lightly with the eraser end of the pencil. “But there’s one thing I want you to remember, Kafka. Those are exactly the kind of people who murdered Miss Saeki’s childhood sweetheart. Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe. Of course it’s important to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to thrive. They’re a lost cause, and I don’t want anyone like that coming in here.” Oshima points at the stacks with the tip of his pencil. What he means, of course, is the entire library. “I wish I could just laugh off people like that, but I can’t.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“When I made pictures, I fell in love with the world. When I made pictures, I felt whole.”
― Stephen King, Duma Key

“It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“I forget sometimes what laughter can do.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“Someday, if your life is long and your thinking machinery stays in gear, you’ll live to remember the last good thing that ever happened to you. That’s not pessimism talking, just logic.”
― Stephen King, Duma Key

“I told myself there was time. Of course, that’s what we always tell ourselves, isn’t it? We can’t imagine time running out, and God punishes us for what we can’t imagine.”
― Stephen King, Duma Key

“The practice of photography is no longer a means for recording reality. Instead, it has become reality itself”
― Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009

“Giuro davanti a Dio che non toccherò mai più né i fiori, né le piante, né le lucertole.”
― Alberto Moravia, Il conformista

“The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

“An artwork unable to make people feel uncomfortable or to feel different is not one worth creating. This is the difference between the artist and the fool.”
― Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009

“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them. And these can rarely be distinctly defined.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“You can be sincere and still be stupid.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

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

“notre personnalité sociale est une création de la pensée des autres.”
― Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu

“Remember that the truth is in the details. No matter how you see the world or what style it imposes on your work as an artist, the truth is in the details. Of course the devil’s there, too—everyone says so—but maybe truth and the devil are words for the same thing. It could be, you know.”
― Stephen King, Duma Key

“The loss of memory isn’t always the problem; sometimes—maybe even often—it’s the solution.”
― Stephen King, Duma Key

“In the matter of learned skills, memory comes to a fork in the road. Down one branch are the it’s-like-riding-a-bicycle skills; things which, once learned, are almost never forgotten. But the creative, ever-changing forebrain skills have to be practiced almost daily, and they are easily damaged or destroyed.”
― Stephen King, Duma Key

“And of our memories, of course. They have voices, too. Ask anyone who has ever lost a limb or a child or a long-cherished dream. Ask anyone who blames himself for a bad decision, usually made in a raw instant (an instant that is most commonly red). Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.”
― Stephen King, Duma Key

“But I remember one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf, it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“The walls are white as the white suits, polished clean as a refrigerator door, and the black face and hands seem to float against it like a ghost.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“What makes people so impatient is what I can’t figure; all the guy had to do was wait.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Sometimes truths are what we run from, and sometimes they are what we seek.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“I thought of the infinitely many points that can divide the space between two human hearts.”
― Daniel Tammet, Thinking In Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math

“If you ask me, psychopaths are more talented than the rest of us... but they're still fucking psychopaths.”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Self-Defense

“Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Some werewolves are hairy on the inside.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue.”
― Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes