Janday > Janday's Quotes

“We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library”
― Carl Sagan

“If by the quarter of the twentieth century godliness wasn’t next to something more interesting than cleanliness, it might be time to reevaluate our notions of godliness.”
― Tom Robbins

“The odor of frying bacon, sausage links, and ham tiptoed on little pig feet all the way to the north end of the second floor. Inevitably, the odor made her simultaneously ravenous and nauseated. She hated the sensation. It reminded her of pregnancy. Every Sunday morning, Leigh-Cheri awoke to a pan of fried fear.”
― Tom Robbins

“Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“A person's looking for a simple truth to live by, there it is. CHOICE. To refuse to passively accept what we've been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That's the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“What I'm saying is simply that every totalitarian society, no matter how strict, has had its underground. In fact, two undergrounds. There's the underground involved in political resistance and the underground involved in preserving beauty and fun--which is to say, preserving the human spirit.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“To think but nobly of my grandmother: Good wombs have borne bad sons.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Come, thou tortoise!”
― William Shakespeare

“Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself
Upon thy wicked dam”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed
With raven's feather from unwholesom fen
Drop on you both! A southwest blow on ye
And blister you all o'er!”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps,
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up. Urchins
Shall forth at vast of night that they may work
All exercise on thee. Thou shalt be pinched
As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging
Than bees that made 'em.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Thou most lying slave,
Whom stripes may move, not kindness!”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“By definition, it is not possible to everyone to be above the average.”
― Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Only in books do we learn what’s really going on.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country