Benjamin > Benjamin's Quotes

“What if I told you that the world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain? If you could perceive reality as it is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“We wanted tranquil minds. We wanted to escape our addiction to the adrenaline rush of connectivity. When Horace advises Lollius Maximus he also advises himself—indeed, the poem may do the latter more than the former. “Interrogate the writings of the wise,” he counsels. Asking them to tell you how you can Get through your life in a peaceable tranquil way. Will it be greed, that always feels poverty-stricken, That harasses and torments you all your days? Will it be hope and fear about trivial things, In anxious alternation in your mind? Where is it virtue comes from, is it from books? Or is it a gift from Nature that can’t be learned? What is the way to become a friend to yourself? What brings tranquility? What makes you care less? (I am using David Ferry’s marvelous translation.) Horace”
― Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

“Nothing’s over, ever.” And this is both a blessing and a curse. The past that ties us to people in ways that hurt us also ties us to people in ways that make healing possible. Sometimes we wish that the past could be over; sometimes we are grateful that it is not. It stands in the middle, “partially completed” but not over, poised between radical otherness and utter likeness. And that is why, as Weil says, “Our attachments and our passions do not so thickly obscure our discrimination of the eternal in the past.” We can see what really matters—“the eternal,” what always matters—because of that middle distance.”
― Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

“To read old books is to get an education in possibility for next to nothing.”
― Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

“the first step in liquidating a people . . . is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.”
― Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

“When we look to the past ... what we are always looking for is whatever "is better than we are" ... The future cannot teach us because we are the ones who must imagine it.”
― Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

“To escape responsibility for violence we imagine it is enough to pledge never to be the first to do violence. But no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.”
― Rene Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

“Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“In theory we understand people, but in practice we can't put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“...with a rush of feeling he felt that this must be happiness. As soon as the thought came to him, he fought it back, blaming the whiskey. The very idea was as dangerous as presumptive speech: happiness could not be sought or worried into being, or even fully grasped; it should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all.”
― John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun

“..the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.”
― John McGahern, All Will Be Well: A Memoir

“I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world.”
― John McGahern

“His abhorrence and fear of alcohol did not extend to his power as host. He kept a huge cupboard of drinks in the station house and loved to serve large measures to visiting relatives--especially those he disliked--about which there was a definite element of spreading bait for garden snails.”
― John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun

“As looking down from great heights brings the urge to fall and end the terror of falling, so his very watching put pressure on them to make a slip as they dried and stacked the plates and cups.”
― John McGahern, Amongst Women

“Across her face there seemed to pass many feelings and reflections: it was as if she ached to touch and gather in and make whole those scattered years of change. But how can time be gathered in and kissed? There is only flesh.”
― John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun

“To leave the everpresent tension of Great Meadow was like shedding stiff, formal clothes or kicking off pinching shoes.”
― John McGahern, Amongst Women

“About this time, whether he felt there wasn't sufficient drama in his life or that he was determined not to be outdone by Miss McCabe, he decided that he was dying.”
― John McGahern, All Will Be Well: A Memoir

“…But all life turns away from its own eventual hopelessness, leaving insomnia and its night to lovers and the dying.”
― John McGahern, Getting Through

“Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary (and potentially subversive) alone with a book the whole razzmatazz of prizes, banquets, television spectaculars, bestseller lists, even literature courses, editors and authors, are all worthless. Unless a book finds lovers among those solitary readers, it will not live . . . or live for long.”
― John McGahern, Love of the World: Essays

“A priest could have no anguish, he’d given up happiness, his fixed life moving in the calm of certainty into its end, cursed by no earthly love or longing, all had been chosen years before.”
― John McGahern, The Dark

“It was some time before Stoner recognized the source of his attraction to Hollis Lomax. In Lomax’s arrogance, his fluency, and his cheerful bitterness, Stoner saw, distorted but recognizable, an image of his friend David Masters. He wished to talk to him as he had talked to Dave; but he could not, even after he admitted his wish to himself. The awkwardness of his youth had not left him, but the eagerness and straightforwardness that might have made the friendship possible had. He knew what he wished was impossible, and the knowledge saddened him.”
― John McGahern, Stoner

“...with a rush of feeling he felt that this must be happiness. As soon as the thought came to him, he fought it back, blaming the whiskey. The very idea was as dangerous as presumptive speech: happiness could not be sought or worried into being, or even fully grasped; it should be allowed its own slow pace so it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all.”
― John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun

“It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.”
― Raymond Carver

“I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”
― Raymond Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall

“And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”
― Raymond Carver

“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
― Raymond Carver

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
― Raymond Carver

“But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window--maybe rearrange all the furniture.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me.”
― Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love