Tom > Tom's Quotes

“What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Artists are dishonest creatures really. They foist their version of reality upon us while making it all up. Writers, painters, musicians, auteurs—they’re all the same.”
― Tom Gething from "Sabotage"

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
― Søren Kierkegaard , The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I needed my mistakes
in their order
to get me here”
― W.S. Merwin, The Moon Before Morning