Pete > Pete's Quotes

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“A boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“He can run faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”
― Fran Lebowitz, The Fran Lebowitz Reader

“Earth's crammed with heaven...
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.”
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

“I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.”
― Richard Hughes

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
― Franz Kafka

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”
― Haruki Murakami

“I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin

“People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food, and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice. When the streets calm and people suggest once again that we hire more Black police officers or create more civilian review boards, I hope that we remember all the times those efforts have failed.”
― Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

“When you say, “What would we do without prisons?” what you are really saying is: “What would we do without civil death, exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence?”
― Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

“There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against Black people.”
― Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice