John > John's Quotes

“Can't stop what's coming. Ain't no waiting on you. That's vanity.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“Simple was never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming too late.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: Study in Ethics and Politics

“You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it. ”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“You don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“There's nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you've suffered.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot?”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Beware the religion that turns you against another one. It's unlikely that it's really religion at all.”
― Joan D. Chittister, God Speaks in Many Tongues: Meditate with Joan Chittister

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“...energy begets energy.”
― John Irving (Author), The World According to Garp

“No true individual has existed yet, able to live, able to die. Only diseased, tragic, or dismal and ludicrous fools who sometimes hoped to achieve some ideal by fiat, by their great desire for it. But usually by bullying all mankind into believing them.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Keep passing the open windows.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“courage is the bridge between our minds and our bodies.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”
― Paul Valéry

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“She wants to live in the delirious professions, as Valéry calls them -- trades in which the main instrument is your opinion of yourself and the raw material is your reputation or standing.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would have once have felt sorry for. It was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn't wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup. It was as though being in tune with life was an accident that might sometimes befall the fortunate young but was otherwise something for which human beings lacked any real affinity. How odd. And how odd it made him seem to be numbered among the countless unembattled normal ones might, in fact, be the abnormality, a stranger from real life because of his being so sturdily rooted.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Life, said Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument—that, friends, is real wisdom.”
― Saul Bellow

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
― Mark Twain