Chuck > Chuck's Quotes

“Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It's a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“If light is in your heart, you will find your way home.”
― Rumi

“The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Or take an instance from the student’s childhood: His parents made him take violin lessons. He was not very gifted and his teacher would interrupt him to criticize his mistakes in a cold, unbearable voice. He felt humiliated, and he wanted to cry. But instead of trying to play in tune and not make mistakes, he would deliberately play wrong notes, the teacher’s voice would become still more unbearable and harsh, and he himself would sink deeper and deeper into his litost.
What then is litost?
Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“...Montag paced the floor and came back and squatted down and read a page as many as ten times, aloud.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it! We've started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years...Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“How painful and absurd, this fantasy that your own
labors might in turn be redeemed by strangers centuries and perhaps continents away who would need to hear what you had to whisper, this delusion that you were doing anything other than babbling because you like the sounds it makes, like a child blowing bubbles into milk.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“We have no choice but to scramble to retrace our steps and to try, in a hurry now, to imagine things differently: other worlds, other ways of thinking, living, seeing. Other ways of writing, and of reading.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time