Brett > Brett's Quotes

“The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful...”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“Does koala bear poop smell like cough drops?”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“[...] almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of 'psst' that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Between skin and skin, there is only light.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”
― Dorothy Parker

“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
― Dorothy Parker

“You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.”
― Dorothy Parker, You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker

“And if my heart be scarred and burned,
The safer, I, for all I learned.”
― Dorothy Parker, Sunset Gun: Poems