Allan > Allan's Quotes

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”
― Henry Miller

“It couldn't be the beer. Donnie McRory was certain of that. If you sent American beer out to be analyzed, the lab would probably phone up and say, 'Your horse has diabetes.”
― Sharyn McCrumb, Bimbos of the Death Sun

“But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country-but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“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

“One golfer a year is hit by lightning. This may be the only evidence we have of god’s existence.”
― Steve Aylett, Atom

“Paul, there is something very slack about a future that will take a biting satire for a vapid dream.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Past Master

“Imagine learning all the great wisdom of the world just so that you can get a job. What an absurdity. We should be learning all the great wisdom of the world in order to become wise.”
― Eddie Campbell

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.”
― T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Writings

“Some have argued that because of its atypicality, Twilight Struggle is not a “real” wargame, but we will leave such jesuitical distinctions to the message boards.”
― Pat Harrigan, Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming

“Today’s professional game designers and analysts similarly insist that wargaming saves lives. But we will also acknowledge something else of Broyles, who in the course of his essay confides, “Nothing I had ever studied was as complex or as creative as the small-unit tactics of Vietnam.” Any wargamer who has lingered into the early morning hours optimizing the loadout on a cardboard or virtual F-16 will understand what this means. Wargames provide the means of exploring exactly those complexities, coupled with the privilege of doing so vicariously.”
― Pat Harrigan, Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming