Alan > Alan's Quotes

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.”
― Henry Green

“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Aye subtle hen”
― Anne Donovan, Hieroglyphics and Other Stories

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”
― Shelby Foote

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“To the question: How do the authors of sketches, stories and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: They are stragglers and they are down at heel.”
― Robert Walser

“We are to blame for this destruction, we who don’t speak your tongue and don’t know how to keep quiet either. We who didn’t come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you’d never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians.”
― Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World

“Leave wasn’t an alternate economic or political model. It was a blank canvas which people could project their hopes, aspirations and frustrations onto. This was the only way you could get voters from the shires to vote with those from post-industrial towns in the north. It was a fantasy land of universal expectation.”
― Ian Dunt, Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now?: A Simple Guide to the Difficulty of Leaving the EU

“Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Should not the Society of Indexers be know as Indexers, Society of, The?”
― Keith Waterhouse