Bjkeefe > Bjkeefe's Quotes

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”
― H.G. Wells, The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman

“If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”
― Howard Nemerov

“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
― Rebecca West

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”
― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second series

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.”
― Chris Abani

“Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”
― Robert Bloch

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: La musique, le cerveau et nous

“When I am dead, I hope it may be said: "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― James Baldwin

“Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.”
― Robinson Jeffers

“Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.”
― Witold Gombrowicz

“Always tell the truth. It's the easiest thing to remember.”
― David Mamet

“Only years of practice will teach you the mysteries and bold certainty of a real gardener, who treads at random, yet tramples on nothing.”
― Karel Čapek

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
― Mark Twain

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
― Margaret Mead

“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.”
― Steven Weinberg

“The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column—in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally—was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth—Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round.”
― Paul Krugman

“We love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America like a 4-year-old loves his mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow.”
― Al Franken, Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right