Ivan > Ivan's Quotes

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

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late”
― Charles Bukowski

“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Human relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death--in a cesspool.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, 'I’m going to pee.' hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking; talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes; the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore; hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce; but always carring on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she’s now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends; your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side and her doing the same; sleeping together”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“I remembered my New
Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to
write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in
his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of
whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a
hoax.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Tombs of Atuan

“The bookcase tipped and the book covers opened like wings over an underbelly of white feathers, dirty with ink.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Why do so many today want to wander off to South Africa or Kenya or India or Russia or Honduras or Costa Rica or Peru to help with justice issues but not spend the same effort in their own neighborhood or community or state? Why do young suburbanites, say in Chicago, want to go to Kentucky or Tennessee to help people but not want to spend that same time to go to the inner city in their own area to help with justice issues? I asked this question to a mature student in my office one day, and he thought he had a partial explanation: 'Because my generation is searching for experiences, and the more exotic and extreme the better. Going down the street to help at a food shelter is good and it is just and some of us are doing that, but it's not an experience. We want experiences.”
― Scot McKnight

“We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things. —ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL”
― Scot McKnight, Praying with the Church: Following Jesus Daily, Hourly, Today

“When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”
― Aesop

“The ideal architect should be a man of letters, a skillful draftsman, a mathematician, familiar with historical studies, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music, not ignorant of medicine, learned in the responses of jurisconsults, familiar with astronomy and astronomical calculations.”
― Vitruvius

“aggressive public displays of virtue are where the morally deplorable hide.”
― Milo Yiannopoulos, Dangerous

“We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — "Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.”
― John Steinbeck

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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

“Yes, Doc, I'm not feeling too well.'

Which was true enough, Kwang Meng considered.

He had honestly not been feeling too well since he contracted poverty, loneliness, boredom, sexual frustration and periodic coughs and colds. Not to speak of his dreary job.”
― Goh Poh Seng, If We Dream Too Long

“Many a time, in my political indifference, I was secretly amused to see him swinging between anti-semitism and his passion for nut cake.”
― August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew: The Memoirs of Hitler's Childhood Friend

“It was at Long Huruk that we encountered the vortex of the dream time of which we had so far only touched the periphery, for this was the semi-nomadic community of mystics and dream wanderers. As we tottered up the bank towards the crumbling longhouse, Nanyet came purposefully down and embraced us both – an unheard-of greeting between Indonesian strangers. He”
― Lawrence Blair, Ring of Fire: An Indonesia Odyssey

“Guy fell silent again. And then he said—and his voice sounded sorrowful and distressed—“Last week I killed my hamster.” “Just by staring at it?” I asked. “Yes,” confirmed Guy.”
― Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats

“The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“I think journalism gets measured by the quality of information it presents, not the drama or the pyretechnics associated with us”
― Bob Woodward

“It seems clear from these results that the purpose of most bullying is to secure status and avoid resistance of any kind. So bullies don’t pick on a classmate in hopes of getting a reaction. Quite the contrary: they bully in hopes of getting no reaction at all.”
― Ken Jennings, Because I Said So!: The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids

“Maybe the Constructionists are open? It was after seven in the morning. I’ll drop through there first. That decided, she turned and strode towards the Constructionist Guild building that she’d visited the day before, Terry happily sleeping on her shoulder.”
― J.L. Mullins, Binding

“Here in Britain, of course, it's Thank Fuck We Got Those Weird Jesus Bastards On The Boat Day”
― Warren Ellis