Jim Harris > Jim's Quotes

“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.”
― Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

“There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn’t between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Recognizing that people's reactions don't belong to you is the only sane way to create. If people enjoy what you've created, terrific. If people ignore what you've created, too bad. If people misunderstand what you've created, don't sweat it. And what if people absolutely hate what you've created? What if people attack you with savage vitriol, and insult your intelligence, and malign your motives, and drag your good name through the mud? Just smile sweetly and suggest - as politely as you possibly can - that they go make their own fucking art. Then stubbornly continue making yours.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

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

“The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“All of Man’s works, all his cities, all his empires, all his monuments will one day crumble to dust. Even the houses of my own dear readers must – though it be for just one day, one hour – be ruined and become houses where the stones are mortared with moonlight, windowed with starlight and furnished with the dusty wind. It is said that in that day, in that hour, our houses become the possessions of the Raven King. Though we bewail the end of English magic and say it is long gone from us and inquire of each other how it was possible that we came to lose something so precious, let us not forget that it also waits for us at England’s end and one day we will no more be able to escape the Raven King than, in this present Age, we can bring him back.” The History and Practice of English Magic by Jonathan Strange, pub. John Murray, London, 1816.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.”
― Clifford D. Simak, City

“The road lay long and black ahead of them and the heat was coming now through the thin soles of their shoes. There were young beans pushing up from the dry brown fields, tiny rows of green sprigs that stretched away in the distance.”
― Larry Brown, Joe

“Our editor, Harry Combs did not suffer fools gladly, although he insisted we cater to the fools that read the newspaper.”
― James Aura, The Cumberland Killers: A Kentucky Mystery

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“I try to count the stars, turning fuzzy as mist rolls off the mountain behind me. I would have made a wish but there's...nothing. I think of the future, of anything I could hope or dream or wish for, and all I see is black emptiness. Stretching out forever. p.266”
― CJ Lyons

“We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.”
― William T. Vollmann, No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Love big, forgive always, do good, and don’t be an asshole.’ That’s yoga, that’s a life well-lived. It’s really that simple. End of story.”
― Seane Corn, Revolution of the Soul: Awaken to Love Through Raw Truth, Radical Healing, and Conscious Action

“Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.”
― Paul Theroux

“First came the wail of a siren across the valley, and then because light travels faster than blood, we saw an explosion, and a second later we felt it and heard the ear-splitting blast.”
― James Aura, The Cumberland Killers: A Kentucky Mystery

“Early one morning in the spring of 1985, I woke up and walked through the valley of the shadow of death, and didn’t even know it.”
― James Aura, The Cumberland Killers: A Kentucky Mystery

“Ike noticed the preacher had pictures of Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms in his office, with a portrait of Jesus in the middle. Ike said that seemed appropriate since the Bible said Jesus was nailed up between two thieves. The preacher didn’t like that much, so Ike quit going to church for awhile.”
― James Aura, The Cumberland Killers: A Kentucky Mystery

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Well if the horse likes you, I reckon I won’t shoot you, then.”
― James Aura, The Cumberland Killers: A Kentucky Mystery