Jemiah Jefferson > Jemiah's Quotes

“Isn't it great when you're a kid and the world is full of anonymous things? Everything is bright and mysterious until you know what it is called and then all the light goes out of it...Once we knew the name of it, how could we ever come to love it?...For things had true natures, and they hid behind false names, beneath the skin we gave them.”
― Colson Whitehead, Apex Hides the Hurt

“Yo! You’re my dope dealer not my thesis adviser. If I wanted your opinion about my dissertation, I’d have asked for it, Motherfucker!”
― Mark Leyner, The Tetherballs of Bougainville

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

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“An author, whether good or bad, or between both, is an animal whom every body is privileged to attack: for though all are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them.”
― Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk

“Why should things be easy to understand?”
― Thomas Pynchon

“credulity and superstition are close friends”
― Frederick Marryat

“America ... loves the successful sociopath and thinks it’s normal to dream of becoming like him.”
― Gary Indiana

“In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people, they have no lawyers.”
― Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars

“They imbibed. It never went far, not among so many, but their naturally frantic edge amplified it, whatever the euphoric, pushed it until giddiness mutated into a sort of epiphany – a pack ritual. And rituals have power.”
― Robert Dunbar, The Streets

“There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“After all, nostalgia is an emotion for people with no future.”
― Kieron Gillen, Phonogram, Vol. 1: Rue Britannia

“Writing is prayer.”
― Franz Kafka

“Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books-- where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables as we did in Kansas.”
― Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

“Nobody should be whipped. Remember that, once and for all. Neither man nor animal can be influenced by anything but suggestion.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog

“The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream : it may be so at the moment after death.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.”
― Werner Herzog

“Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.”
― Werner Herzog

“There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”
― Werner Herzog, Herzog on Herzog

“Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this?”
― Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice

“Writing a book is an adventure: it begins as an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, then a master, and finally a tyrant.” — Sir Winston Churchill”
― Marilyn Ross, The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing: Everything You Need to Know to Write, Publish, Promote and Sell Your Own Book

“Time and I have quarrelled. All hours are midnight now. I had a clock and a watch, but I destroyed them both. I could not bear the way they mocked me.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Is that a small moon?” I said. “Negative,” Data said. “It is an artificial construct, perhaps a space station.” “It’s larger than any space station I’ve ever seen,”
― David A. Goodman, The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard