Ben > Ben's Quotes

“Something good will come of all things yet”
― Jack Kerouac

“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Occult Theft,--Theft which hides itself even from itself, and is legal, respectable, and cowardly,--corrupts the body and soul of man, to the last fibre of them. And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists”
― John Ruskin, The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings

“Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.”
― Jack Kerouac

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.”
― Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home

“It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Life is unjust and this is what makes it so beautiful. Every day is a gift. Be brave and take hold of it.”
― Garrison Keillor

“We come from people who brought us up to believe that life is a struggle, and if you should feel really happy, be patient: this will pass.”
― Garrison Keillor

“When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.”
― Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America

“I want to retain my own identity. Therefore the thing I’m most anxious to avoid is any kind of work that can be considered ‘interesting’ in its own right. I want something that can’t possibly touch me. I want some big, swollen corporation that’s been bumbling along making money in its sleep for a hundred years, where they have to hire eight guys for every one job because none of them can be expected to care about whatever boring thing it is that they are supposed to be doing. I want to go into that kind of place and say, Look. You can have my body and my nice college-boy smile for so many hours a day, in exchange for so many dollars, and beyond that we’ll leave each other strictly alone.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”
― Diane Ackerman