David > David's Quotes

“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world. We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.”
― John Steinbeck

“Eternally Weeps the Groundhog.”
― David Sedaris, Theft by Finding: Diaries

“July 7, 1995 New York Someone stopped Mitch on the street last night and said, “I need another seventy-five cents so I can buy a cheeseburger. How about helping me?” Mitch said, “Get it without the cheese,” and continued walking”
― David Sedaris, Theft by Finding: Diaries

“It was Muriel Spark, in her novel Memento Mori: “If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“For the bus ride, which Delaney estimated would be ninety minutes, she had prepared a mix of happy journeying music, which she activated as they pulled out of the campus gate. The first song was by Otis Redding, and the first message came via her phone. Woman-hater, it said, with a link to an unsigned and evidence-less post hinting that he had been unkind to an ex-girlfriend who he’d met shortly before the bay and the dock and the sitting. Thanks for the early-morning pick-me-up! the writer said, meaning that Delaney had ruined the day and tacitly endorsed Redding’s newly alleged misogyny. Delaney skipped to the next song, Lana Del Rey’s “High by the Beach,” and then quickly figured it was too big a risk so skipped ahead. The third song, the Muppets’ “Movin’ Right Along,” was unknown to most on the bus, and survived its three-minute length, during which a handful of passengers furiously tried to find a reason the song was complicit in evil committed or implied. Delaney skipped the next song, by Neil Diamond, thinking any Jewish singer dubious in light of the Israeli sandwich debacle, skipped songs six and seven (from Thriller), briefly considered the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” but then remembered Phil Spector, and so finally settled on a young Ghanian rapper she’d recently discovered. His first song was hunted down quickly in a hail of rhetorical buckshot—as a teen, the rapper had zinged a borderline joke about his female trigonometry teacher—so Delaney turned off the shared music, leaving everyone, for the next eighty-one minutes, to their earbuds and the safety of their individualized solitude.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“You may or may not have noticed an overall degradation of the language, and a proliferation of errors of spelling and grammar in even the most official documents?”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“And then I saw what I was to see so many times on the journey—a look of longing. “Lord! I wish I could go.” “Don’t you like it here?” “Sure. It’s all right, but I wish I could go.” “You don’t even know where I’m going.” “I don’t care. I’d like to go anywhere.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America

“Take it from me, a print journalist. “Content Is Free”—that’s the founding concept of the Internet. I spent forty years as a print journalist. Now I’m a “content provider.” And . . . Content Is Free.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land

“I have taken to arriving at the office one hour later than I am expected. Therefore, I am far more rested and refreshed when I do arrive, and I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“When people are engaged in something they are not proud of, they do not welcome witnesses. In fact, they come to believe the witness causes the trouble.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America

“I think the March on Washington is going to be a watershed event, don’t you?” “Maybe. But crackers digging in their heels to preserve the way of life they like has usually been the response to any forward motion us colored folks have tried.” “That’s kind of cynical, isn’t it?” “Or just a realistic observation.”
― Gary Phillips, One-Shot Harry

“If I’m hearing you right,” the judge says, “what you’re outlining is a coup of sorts that will sweep across this country largely unnoticed until it is too late—until the American people have been decimated economically, intellectually, and spiritually. It comes together on a decision day that results in the emergence of a new America.” “Yes,” the Big Guy says. “And no one will read it as an inside job. It’s a new American dream.”
― A.M. Homes, The Unfolding

“But it doesn’t need to be perfect, perfection equals pressure.”
― A.M. Homes, The Unfolding

“Covid is but a prelude for how states will handle the era of catastrophic climate change. It is a test run of what happens when powerful elites deem the public disposable without even feigning a pretense of concern. It is a dark omen of our lost leverage.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“You know that great line that you hear all the time: ‘This is not us. This is not us. This is not America,’ ” Turnbull said. “You know what? It is, actually.” “It was too broad a section of the community to be complacent about,” he said.”
― Jonathan Martin, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future

“But a fast car and an open road can give you a sensation that’s hard to duplicate elsewhere or otherwise.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Mercy is the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and there is mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“His most glorious gaffes were mind-bending adventures that challenged the linear nature of time: “I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future”; “The future will be better tomorrow”; “The real question for 1988 is whether we’re going to go forward to tomorrow or past to the… to the back”; and “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.” Quayle’s verbal contortions would have killed a lesser man, but he remained unbowed. “I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made,” he declared.”
― Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

“The closer you are to death, the more attached you become to life,”
― Christopher Fowler, Full Dark House

“If the powerful cannot be held accountable, democracy becomes a joke.”
― Margaret Sullivan, Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life

“Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with our world’s existential problems: climate, coronavirus, the battle for truth.”
― Margaret Sullivan, Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life

“Pelosi would create a special House committee to investigate the insurrection. A few weeks later, the House considered a bill to award a Congressional Gold Medal to every officer who defended the Capitol on January 6th. It was a simple, apolitical gesture of recognition. The Congressional Gold Medal bill did not call for any kind of investigation or cast aspersions on anyone. It merely honored the officers who risked their lives to stop a violent insurrection. Even so, twenty-one Republicans voted against it. For the historical record, here are the names of those twenty-one spineless fucks: Andrew Clyde, Paul Gosar, Jody Hice, Lauren Boebert, Barry Moore, Ralph Norman, Matthew Rosendale, Chip Roy, Warren Davidson, Scott Perry, Mary Miller, Andy Biggs, Thomas Massie, Andy Harris, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louie Gohmert, Michael Cloud, Greg Steube, Bob Good, and John Rose.”
― Michael Fanone, Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop's Battle for America's Soul

“But on January 6th for the first time, I was more afraid to work at the Capitol than my entire deployment to Iraq,” Aquilino told the committee. “In Iraq, we expected armed violence because we were in a war zone, but nothing in my experience in the Army or as a law enforcement officer prepared me for what we confronted on January 6th.” During the riot, Aquilino said, he was kicked, pushed, shoved, spit on, and sprayed with chemical irritants. Someone targeted his eyes with a laser. He was attacked with hammers, rebars, batons, police shields, rods, and a metal pole flying an American flag. Aquilino said the rioters tried to pull him into the crowd, and one of them beat him with his own baton. “I, too, was being crushed by the rioters,” Aquilino said. “I could feel myself losing oxygen and thinking to myself, ‘This is how I’m going to die, defending this entrance.’ ” Aquilino suffered injuries to both hands, his left shoulder, right calf, and right foot. His foot and shoulder wounds—a labrum tear and rotator cuff damage—required painful surgery.”
― Michael Fanone, Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop's Battle for America's Soul

“Everything about Donald Trump, starting with his campaign, told me that he had the makings of an autocrat. How he celebrated violence against protesters during campaign rallies. How he strove to dehumanize the press. His threats to use presidential power to punish, even imprison, opponents. His hateful language and racist dog whistles.”
― Martin Baron, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and THE WASHINGTON POST

“The authors of How Democracies Die described how a demagogue who violates rules and norms can provoke others to do the same, further eroding democracy.”
― Martin Baron, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and THE WASHINGTON POST

“I knew from my time overseas, a free society that abandons the truth—that abandons the rule of law—cannot remain free.”
― Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning

“Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it’s the easiest to rationalize. We don’t tell ourselves, “I’m never going to write my symphony.” Instead we say, “I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Everything changes and nothing changes.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time