Nick Imrie > Nick's Quotes

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. ”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality?”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.”
― Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem

“How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“War is just demographics in a hurry.”
― Gary Brecher, War Nerd

“Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“It is, in fact, asking for trouble if you are more altruist than the society that surrounds you”
― Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not...

“He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“After expressing his appreciation that his glass is half full rather than being completely empty, he will go on to express his delight in even having a glass: It could, after all, have been broken or stolen.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Our parents, our children, our spouses, and our friends will continue to press every button we have, until we realize what it is that we don't want to know about ourselves, yet. They will point us to our freedom every time.”
― Byron Katie, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life

“People who have absolute power tend to grow very fragile, because they have so little experience of not getting their own way and surviving that setback.”
― Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

“A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.”
― Germaine Greer

“A people that doesn't live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and storytellers, is in a bad way. The center of the world is where you live fully, where you know how things are done, how things are done rightly, done well.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“A fart is not only a political statement; it is also a weapon.”
― Bridget Christie, A Book for Her

“In describing a fairy story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: 'this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty'. But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that begun thus: 'this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy'; though that to my mind would be much more appropriate.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf: Includes Mythopoeia and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth

“My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“A poem is a piece of semiotic sport, in which the signifier has been momentarily released from its grim communicative labours and can disport itself disgracefully. Freed from a loveless marriage to a single meaning, it can play the field, wax promiscous, gambol outrageously with similar unattached signifiers. If the guardians of conventional morality knew what scandalous stuff they were inscribing on their tombstones, they would cease to do so immediately.”
― Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem

“No one, I fancy, would discredit a story that the Archbishop of Canterbury slipped on a banana skin merely because he found that a similar comic mishap had been reported of many people, and especially of elderly gentlemen of dignity.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf: Includes Mythopoeia and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth

“the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien On Fairy-stories

“That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural; whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien On Fairy-stories

“Discussing the character of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is a matter of content (of 'what?'), whereas examining Jane Austen's techniques of characterisation is a question of form (or 'how?'). Some may find these fine distinctions scholastic, but then some find any fine distinctions scholastic.”
― Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem

“Enchantment produces a Secondary World, into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose. Magic produces, or pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World. It does not matter by whom it is said to be practised, fay or mortal, it remains distinct from the other two; it is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf: Includes Mythopoeia and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth

“One cliché attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely. If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Minds have their own weather systems. You are in a hurricane. Hurricanes run out of energy eventually. Hold on.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“The Rule of Three is simply getting the other guy to agree to the same thing three times in the same conversation. It’s tripling the strength of whatever dynamic you’re trying to drill into at the moment. In doing so, it uncovers problems before they happen. It’s really hard to repeatedly lie or fake conviction.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat them with logic or brute force. Ask them questions that open paths to your goals. It’s not about you.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It