Ethan > Ethan's Quotes

“My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.”
― Gene Wolfe

“That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator

“The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.”
― Gene Wolfe, Endangered Species: Short Stories

“You seem to think that the only genuine existence evil can have is conscious existence - that no one is evil unless he admits it to himself. I disagree.”
― Gene Wolfe

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted
into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights

“God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I have two rules in life - to hell with it, whatever it is, and get your work done.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“The beautiful word minunthadios, “short-lived,” is used of both Achilles and Hector, and applies to all of us.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Here’s a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.”
― Robin Sloan, Sourdough