David > David's Quotes

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“It felt like faith, like revelation: that things went on, that life ground on regardless, and mindless, and produced pain and pleasure and hope and fear and joy and despair, and you dodged some of it and you sought some of it and sometimes you were lucky
and sometimes you weren’t, and sometimes you could plan your way ahead and that would be the right thing to have done, but other times all you could do was forget about plans and just be ready to react, and sometimes the obvious was true and sometimes it
wasn’t, and sometimes experience helped but not always, and it was all luck, fate, in the end; you lived, and you waited to see what happened, and you would rarely ever be sure that what you had done was really the right thing or the wrong thing, because things can
always be better, and things can always be worse.”
― Iain Banks

“Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.”
― Iain Banks

“I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me God? What have I done to deserve this?" and I thought at least I'm free of that, at least I can simply treat it as bad luck and get on with it.”
― Iain M. Banks

“Everyone loves a mysterious country.”
― M. John Harrison, Things That Never Happen

“One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.”
― Astrid Lindgren

“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”
― Herman Hesse