J > J's Quotes

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“If I could order any drink I wanted now, it would be a Sweet Rob Roy on the Rocks, a Manhattan made with Scotch. That was another drink a woman introduced me to, and it made me laugh instead of cry, and fall in love with the woman who said to try one. That was in Manila, after the excrement hit the air-conditioning in Saigon. She was Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent from Iowa. She had a son by me without telling me. His name? Rob Roy.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.”
― Cynthia Ozick

“In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried ... nothing is so warming and companionable.”
― Elizabeth Goudge

“A writer should read until he is filled to the brim and like a pitcher which is over-filled over flows. And then he should write.”
― Charles Nodier

“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
― Novalis

“Every single pleasure I can imagine or have experienced is more delightful, more of a pleasure, if you take it in small sips, if you take your time. Reading is not an exception.”
― Amos Oz

“People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard

“The mountains are calling and I must go.”
― John Muir

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.”
― Mary Wortley Montagu

“Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.”
― John Hodgman

“If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either”
― James M. Cain

“Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“The master is not the one who teaches; it's the one who suddenly learns.”
― Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Grande Sertao: Veredas

“The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replies.”
― Andre Maurois

“Then, after a long fireside rest and a glance at my note-book, I cut a few leafy branches for a bed, and fell into the clear, death-like sleep of the tired mountaineer. Early”
― John Muir, The Mountains of California [with Biographical Introduction]

“Sometimes we spend so much time and energy thinking about where we want to go that we don't notice where we happen to be.”
― Dan Gutman, From Texas with Love

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“But the darkest scriptures of the mountains are illumined with bright passages of love that never fail to make themselves felt when one is alone. I”
― John Muir, The Mountains of California [with Biographical Introduction]

“Here are the roots of all the life of the valleys, and here more simply than elsewhere is the eternal flux of nature manifested.”
― John Muir, The Mountains of California [with Biographical Introduction]

“I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; for there is a law of contraries; the excess of freedom passes into the excess of slavery, and the greater the freedom the greater the slavery.”
― Plato, The Republic

“When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.”
― John Lennon

“Linh has informed me of something called ‘fox’ coffee, ca-phe-chon, a brew made from the tenderest beans, fed to a fox (though I have since seen it referred to as a weasel), and the beans later recovered from the animal’s stool, washed (presumably), roasted, and ground. Sounds good to me.”
― Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

“I’m still here, I tell myself. I’m still here.”
― Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

“And I made things worse—far worse—in all the drearily predictable ways. Underscore that sentence.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

“I often talk about the “Grandma rule” for travelers. You may not like Grandma’s Thanksgiving turkey. It may be overcooked and dry—and her stuffing salty and studded with rubbery pellets of giblet you find unpalatable in the extreme. You may not even like turkey at all. But it’s Grandma’s turkey. And you are in Grandma’s house. So shut the fuck up and eat it. And afterward, say, “Thank you, Grandma, why, yes, yes of course I’d love seconds.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

“It has been objected that justice is honesty in the sense of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but is taken by Socrates to mean all virtue.”
― Plato, The Republic