Patty > Patty's Quotes

“It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.”
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

“It was not an outhouse resting upon the imagination. It was reality.”
― Richard Brautigan

“I was willingly confused by the times”
― Richard Hugo

“To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

- Howl”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“Instances of delightfulness are always intrinsically beautiful, so to speak, and yet under the right circumstances they may be swinish as well, for what is humanly beautiful might, as it were, be too beautiful for human beings, for which reason people are glad to place beauty in proximity to pigpens, as one is no doubt justified in saying.”
― Robert Walser, Microscripts

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“I need, therefore I imagine.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“Imagine the marvels we would experience if we believed in the things in which we don't believe.”
― Luis Fernando Verissimo, Borges and the Eternal Orangutans

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”
― Shelby Foote

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

“Naturally I am of the deeply felt conviction that it is quite nice, quite lovely to be capable of enthusiam.”
― Robert Walser, Berlin Stories

“As for the public, the PR man, like the advertising expert and others who deal with people in the lump, including a number of would-be-statesmen and redeemers-at-large, conceive of that body as composed of non-ideographic units which are to be regarded not as ourselves but as, ultimately, gadgets of electrochemical circuitry operated by a push-button system of remote control. In fact, in dealing with the public in a purely technological society, the very notion of self is bypassed by various appeals to an undifferentiated unconscious, such appeals often having little or no relation to the vendible object or idea; in this connection history gives us to contemplate the fact that the psychologist J.B. Watson, the founder of American behaviorism, wound up in the advertising business. So history may become parable.”
― Robert Penn Warren, Democracy and Poetry

“Well, they said, these are the pies we have. It was a proverb.”
― Anne Carson

“Hate is also creative: it creates more hate.”
― Henry Dumas, Knees of a Natural Man

“…the people who dwell in the land of dimness, the people who could not see themselves except as formless shadows moving in a mist, the people who had gouged out their own eyes to keep from looking at themselves in the mirror, these people, these glorious people were none other than ourselves: The Americans.”
― Henry Dumas, Jonoah & the Green Stone

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson