David Davy > David's Quotes

“Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

“The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.”
― Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

“We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.”
― Cory Doctorow

“It's not Adventureland, but you write some poems, the leaves move, and you get laid sometimes." Tom Drury's Pierre Hunter on life.”
― Tom Drury

“O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus, L’été

“wI don’t care what they say about Aretha. She can be hiding out in her house in Detroit for years. She can go decades without taking a plane or flying off to Europe. She can cancel half her gigs and infuriate every producer and promoter in the country. She can sing all kinds of jive-ass songs that are beneath her. She can go into her diva act and turn off the world. But on any given night, when that lady sits down at the piano and gets her body and soul all over some righteous song, she’ll scare the shit out of you. And you’ll know—you’ll swear—that she’s still the best fuckin’ singer this fucked-up country has ever produced.”
― Billy Preston

“Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.”
― Richard Powers

“If you yourself are not a victim, you cannot claim to see the world as the victim does.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.”
― Isaac Newton

“Six hundred years passed between the moment Chinese alchemists discovered gunpowder and the moment Turkish cannon pulverized the walls of Constantinople. Only forty years passed between the moment Einstein determined that any kind of mass could be converted into energy - that's what E= mc² means - and the moment atom bombs obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear power stations mushroomed all over the globe.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“He lifts his face and she sees the eyes of a man who has not slept and is met with pity for him, for what is known by the telling of the hands, how the man has been trained for the rules of the game but the game is changed so what now is the man?”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“To oppose something is to maintain it… To be sure, if you turn your back on [something] and walk away from it, you are still on the [same] road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin

“Her husband says that Africa from space looks like a late Turner; those near-formless landscapes of thick impasto shot with light. He’d told her once that if he were ever to be where she is, he’d spend his whole time in tears, helpless in the face of the earth’s bare beauty. But that he’d never be where she is because he’s a man who disappoints himself with his need of firm ground. He needs stability inside and out, and to simplify his life lest it overwhelm him. There are people like him (so he says) who complicate their inner lives by feeling too much all at once, by living in knots, and who therefore need outer things to be simple. A house, a field, some sheep for example. And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious and limitless. Those people can swap out a house for a spaceship, a field for a universe. And though he’d give his leg to be the latter, it’s not the kind of thing you can trade a leg for – in any case who’d want his leg if they already had limitlessness?”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“He needs stability inside and out, and to simplify his life lest it overwhelm him. There are people like him (so he says) who complicate their inner lives by feeling too much all at once, by living in knots, and who therefore need outer things to be simple. A house, a field, some sheep for example. And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious and limitless.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“We think we're the wind, but we're just the leaf.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre