Ryan > Ryan's Quotes

“For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“If, through some kind of reincarnation, it were possible to be reborn as Ushikawa's clothing, with a guarantee of rare glory in the next rebirth, I would still not want to do it.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write”
― W.S. Merwin, Opening the Hand

“In the Ondariva gardens the branches spread out like the tentacles of extraordinary animals, and the plants on the ground opened up stars of fretted leaves like the green skins of reptiles, and waved feathery yellow bamboos with a rustle like paper.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“All this intelligent and careful work revealed a man of great forethought. Yet you could see in Mr. Wicks's eyes--as he stood in the shade of the terminal awning, all that tweed and education waving to us, as one by one each bus pulled out for the noisy drive into the city--that he had failed.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“This was a mouth that had suffered many slings and arrows along with the occasional thrashing and several hundredweight of tobacco and Cadbury's milk chocolate. This was a mouth through which a great deal of life had passed at, it would appear, an uncompromising speed.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“... the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“The crowd is not us. It never is.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“A charge often levied against organic agriculture is that it is more philosophy than science. There's some truth to this indictment, if that it what it is, though why organic farmers should feel defensive about it is itself a mystery, a relic, perhaps, of our fetishism of science as the only credible tool with which to approach nature. ... The peasant rice farmer who introduces ducks and fish to his paddy may not understand all the symbiotic relationships he's put in play--that the ducks and fishes are feeding nitrogen to the rice and at the same time eating the pests. But the high yields of food from this ingenious polyculture are his to harvest even so.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“To exhaustion and beyond they prayed, to that glittering place where the flesh dies and is born again, where all is agony, and finally, just as La Inca was feeling her spirit begin to loose itself from its earthly pinions, just as the circle began to dissolve--”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Wondering aloud, If we were orcs, wouldn't we, at a racial level, imagine ourselves to look like elves?”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Their flashlight newly activated, they walked him into the cane--never had he heard anything so loud and alien, the susurration, the crackling, the flashes of motion underfoot (snake? mongoose?), overhead even the stars, all of them gathered in vainglorious congress.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“We all know he kept a bowl of live frogs by his resting slab in the Oval Office that he would snack on during meetings.”
― John Hodgman, More Information Than You Require

“The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“... Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build--but what happens when in all the world there are only termite hills left but no bush?”
― Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

“The world was all mud and wire. The war in the heavens was only a faint imitation of the horror men had learned to make.”
― Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

“We were dancing, lost in the godbeat and the thrash and the screaming--TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK!”
― Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

“A squiggle, they are believed to be the first animal ever drawn.”
― Bryan Christy, The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers

“As I touched the beast I remembered how, even on that long-ago night, I could feel a tremendous thing moving in the depths below me, something vast and white and singing.”
― Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton

“And as I walked, I believed myself to be an Adam setting foot in a new Eden, sinless and wild-eyed, my sinews still stiff with creation.”
― Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton

“But, for now, I retreated back down the little hidden staircase into the familiar world of the basement of the Natural History Museum, and to the embrace of the trilobites.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.”
― Clay Shirky

“The only one who didn't know was George Lucas. We kept it from him, because we wanted to see what his face looked like when it changed expression--and he fooled us even then. He got Industrial Light and Magic to change his facial expressions for him and THX sound to make the noise of a face-changing expression.”
― Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

“There were no larks anymore. There was only the setting sun spreading blood up the sky and the yowl of hounds on a breast-high scent.”
― Sam Llewellyn, The Well Between the Worlds

“I made the only decision I ever knew how to make,' Truman famously asserted in one of his carefully scripted reminiscences. What does that mean, exactly? Did Truman see himself as a professional decision-maker with a narrow specialty, the choice between destroying and not destroying Japanese cities?”
― James Morrow, Shambling Towards Hiroshima

“At last my liaison pulled up before a squat structure of poured concrete buttressed with steel, bleak and featureless, like a sepulcher for people who didn't believe in an afterlife.”
― James Morrow, Shambling Towards Hiroshima