Brett > Brett's Quotes

“It withheld the refreshment in a sleep slept on it. It imposed a furtiveness on the loving done on it. Like a sore tooth that is not content to throb in isolation, but must diffuse its own pain to other parts of the body—making breathing difficult, vision limited, nerves unsettled, so a hated piece of furniture produces a fretful malaise that asserts itself throughout the house and limits the delight of things not related to it.           The”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Don't thank me,” she said. “I didn't do it out of any love for you. If I'd refused, you'd have killed me. This way, I've got a few hours' head start.”
― Richard Stark, The Hunter

“It was strange, in a way, that now it was only the people he remembered. At the time he had never thought about people at all, but only of issues, of theories and dogmas and the masses, and now that it was all over and half his brain had been lost in the fight he never thought of the issues at all. Charles”
― Richard Stark, The Man with the Getaway Face

“It was dangerous to kill when there wasn't enough reason, because after a while killing became the solution to everything, and when you got to thinking that way you were only one step from the chair.”
― Richard Stark, The Man with the Getaway Face

“Nobody but Parker can irritate people so quick.” Jacko”
― Richard Stark, The Outfit

“I can take a lot of pain without falling apart. I’ve had to learn to do that. But it was hard, today, to keep peddling and keep up with the others when just about everyone I saw made me feel worse and worse. My”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Get focused on arranging to survive so that we can do more than just get batted around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don’t know what they’re doing!” She”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“I’m still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“And what? You think it’s going to get sane? It’s never been sane. You just have to go ahead and live, no matter what.” I didn’t know what to say, so I kissed”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Don’t hope for a life without problems,” the panda said. “There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“I could choose a better problem,”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“Anger was foreign to him; he had only felt it once before. But now it came, a wash of it that made him swell, that drained and left him weak. And he himself was the object of it. For hadn’t he known? Hadn’t he taken a name for himself, knowing that the name was a crystallization of all he had ever been and done? All he had ever been and done was alone. Why should he have let himself feel any other way?”
― Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

“Curt Loehr, the Oankali said, needed people to look after. People stabilized him, gave him purpose. Without them, he might have been a criminal—or dead.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Dawn

“Down on Earth,” she said carefully, “there are no people left to draw lines on maps and say which sides of those lines are the right sides. There is no government left. No human government, anyway.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Dawn

“What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one’s options, and reduce one’s freedom. One became a servant of one’s wealth or power, constrained to spend all one’s time protecting it.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Hierarchy, you know. And their place in the hierarchy. As long as it’s high enough. Everyone bound into their places. It’s safer than freedom. And a lot of people are cowards.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“It’s stupid because it makes the assumption that your enemies are weaker than you, and will do what you want if you murder a few of them. But people aren’t like that. I mean, think about how it will fall out. You go down that canyon and kill a bunch of people doing their jobs, and later other people come along and find the bodies. They’ll hate you forever. Even if you do take over Mars someday they’ll still hate you, and do anything they can to screw things up.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“It’s strange to learn that in Livermore, California, one of the first light bulbs ever manufactured remains lit, over a hundred years after it was first switched on. In the earliest example of planned obsolescence, it took a group decision by light-bulb manufacturers in the 1950s to specifically limit the life of all subsequently made bulbs to a few years, in order to ensure that people would have to come back and buy more.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“Thoughts rapping quietly, metallically, distinctly: a mysterious aero carries me to the blue heights of my favorite abstractions. And here in this cleanest sharp air, I see my rationale about my “rights” burst with a light pop, like a pneumatic tire. And I can see clearly that these ideas about “rights” were merely a throwback from a ridiculous superstition of the Ancients.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“I was free again—that is, rather, I was included again in the well-constructed, infinitely stretching Assyrian rows.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“Well, which final revolution do you want then? There isn’t a final one. Revolutions are infinite. Final things are for children because infinity scares children and it is important that children sleep peacefully at night . . .”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“says Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo. “People got this idea that ultimately what mattered was the quality of what you were doing and how much importance you gave to it, regardless of how widespread it became or how many records it sold.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“Dukowski replied. “The easy solution isn’t a solution, it’s the fucking problem. It’s too easy to have someone tell you what to do. It is harder to make your own decision. We put a certain amount of trust into the people that come to see us.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“says Ginn. “I never considered it rough. I considered it not having money, but I always think, if you’re asleep on a floor, how can you tell the difference anyway—you’re asleep.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“In terms of the peripherals, the attitude of do-it-yourself, that kind of thing, not being a remote rock star and having layers of management and record labels and all that—instead, booking your own shows, doing your own publicity if necessary. Not everything has to be so home industry, but being willing to do whatever is necessary and not considering one’s self remote, dealing with the guy at the distributor and respecting people for the job that they’re doing, not thinking they should conform to some narrow aspect. “I think,” Ginn concludes, “Black Flag promoted the idea of just jumping off the ledge and doing it.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“Music journalist Chris Nelson once wrote, “Their friendship formed the living core of the Minutemen, while their loyalty to each other and San Pedro informed the overarching theme of brotherhood that permeates the band’s catalog.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“Fired up by the punk explosion, they wrote their first song—“Storming Tarragona.” Named after the down-at-heel housing development where Boon lived, the song was about tearing down the projects and building real houses for people to live in. Boon and Watt, it turned out, had a powerful populist streak. “D. Boon didn’t think our dads got a fair shake,” Watt says, “and I think he was kind of railing against that ever since.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“Sometimes the Minutemen got grief for being their own road crew. “But I never thought that you should play up to ‘the princeling,’ ” says Watt, referring to the prototypical pampered rock star. “So what if nobody sees you playing the fuckin’ hero or the star. I never fancied myself like that.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“Artistically (and in many other ways), the band was liberated by the fact that they’d never sign to a major label. “In a way, we were cheating because we didn’t have that light at the end of the tunnel,” Prescott says. “And who knows? We were human—if the light had been there, maybe we would have turned crappy quicker. It’s a really hard thing to say. Now I’m glad that it was like it was.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991