Wumbo > Wumbo's Quotes

“You pays your money and you takes your choice.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. A handsome woman talks nonsense, you listen and hear not nonsense but cleverness. She says and does horrid things, and you see only charm. And if a handsome woman does not say stupid or horrid things, you at once persuade yourself that she is wonderfully clever and moral.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

“Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education.
She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
― Socrates

“Advice to Young Journal Keepers. Be lenient with yourself. Conceal your worst faults, leave out your most shameful thoughts, actions, and temptations. Give yourself all the good and interesting qualities you want and haven't got. If you should die young, what comfort would it be to your relatives to read the truth and have to say: It is not a pearl we have lost, but a swine?”
― Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Misalliance

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

“Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck.”
― Joss Whedon

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. ”
― Joss Whedon

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.”
― Zen Proverb