Adam > Adam's Quotes

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“What I've learned is that there is nothing in this life that does not fail to disappoint us, even our own deaths.”
― Joe Meno, The Boy Detective Fails

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Happiness is a warm puppy.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook

“Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what man could think up.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

“It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

“I want you to know that I'm just like you, and, just like you, sometimes I have a little trouble holding things together.”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

“People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“One day, I learned that a single look can change everything. And since then I have seen it countless times. I have grappled to understand it and failed. For instance, all it took was a look from another man for my wife to fall out of love with me. It baffles me that a simple alignment of eyes can cause so much devastation.”
― Ali Shaw, The Girl With Glass Feet

“Okay, this is the wisdom. First, time spent on reconnaissanse is never wasted. Second, almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon. And finally, there is no problem on Earth that can't be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea.”
― Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey

“The defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“A number of terrible things about falling in love make it not worth the time and the effort. But the worst of these is that we can never truly fall in love with a person, but only what we think that person is - more precisely, we fall in love with an image of a person that we create in our minds based on a few inconsequential traits: hair color; bloodline; timbre of voice; preference in music or literature. We are so quick to make a judgment on first sight, and it is so easy for us to decide that the object of our love is unquestionably perfect. And while people can only be human at best, these same fallible humans are more than capable of imagining each other to be infallible gods.
Any relationship we have with another human being is an ongoing process of error correction, altering this image that we see in our mind's eye whenever we lay love-blinded eyes on our beloved. It changes bit by bit until it matches the beloved herself, who is invariably less than perfect, often unworthy of love, and often incapable of giving love. This is why any extended interpersonal relationship other than the most superficial, be it a friendship, a romance, or a tie between father and daughter, must by necessity involve disappointment and pain. When the woman you worship behaves as a human being eventually will, she does not merely disappoint; she commits sacrilege, as if the God we worship were to somehow damn Himself.”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“There are no new stories in the world anymore, and no more storytellers. There is nothing left but fragments of phrases that signaled their telling: once upon a time; why; and then; the end. But these phrases have lost their meanings through endless repetition, like everything else in this modern, mechanical age. And this machine age has no room for stories. These days we seek our pleasures out in single moments cast in amber, as if we have no desire to connect the future to the past. Stories? We have no time for them; we have no patience.”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“Why doesn’t their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up? I thought I was a Christian but I’m not. I’m something else and I don’t know what. Everything I have ever taken for right and wrong these people have taught me—these same, these very people. So it’s me, it’s not them. Something has happened to me.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see around walls, we can’t see heat or cold, we can’t see electricity or radio signals, we can’t see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ We can’t even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible.”
― David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders

“We become like those pious people who, over time, accumulate a sense of their own virtuousness so powerful as to make them believe the bad things they do are virtuous too.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Worrying does not take away tomorrow’s troubles. It takes away today’s peace.”
― Randy Armstrong