Timday > Timday's Quotes

“The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.”
― Harlan Ellison

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week. ”
― Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!

“Question: If there were two of you which one would win?”
― Douglas Coupland

“To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.”
― Abraham Maslow

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”
― Marguerite Duras

“Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”
― Robert Heinlein

“To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.”
― Jacques Derrida

“The village is coming back, like it or not.”
― David Brin, Tomorrow Happens

“...Shouldn't schools be the place where students interact with interesting books? Shouldn't the faculty have an ongoing laser-like commitment to put good books in our students' hands? Shouldn't this be a front-burner issue at all times?”
― Kelly Gallagher, Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It

“One day in the country
Is worth a month in town”
― Christina Rossetti

“Books are memory. They remember their contents and pass them on. They keep track of who claims ownership, who they were given by and for what occasion. They mediate, in their margins, disagreements between reader and author.”
― Eileen Gunn, Stable Strategies and Others

“We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.”
― Cory Doctorow

“So my offense is what, misdemeanor gargling?”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“In Bottletown, even our tears flicker like jewels.”
― Jeff Noon, Vurt

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
― Henry Adams

“Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It's a good life, enjoy it.”
― Jim Henson

“If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!”
― Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background

“In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.”
― Iain M. Banks, Matter

“I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Then he explained in a whisper that the plan was composed entirely of awesome. It was made and designed by the House of Awesome, from materials found in the deep awesome mines of Awesometania and it would be recorded in the Annals of Awesome - and nowhere else, because any other book would catch fire and explode from the awesome - and by its awesomeness it would be known from now until the crack of doom.”
― nick harkaway, Tigerman

“The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Doomed

“There was a button," Holden said. "I pushed it."
"Jesus Christ. That really is how you go through life, isn't it?”
― James S.A. Corey, Nemesis Games