Steve > Steve's Quotes

“Even dumb objects have their destiny. Rarely given a second thought, they perform their unconsidered duty day by day until their moment arrives and everything seems to hang on their location.”
― Lindsay Clarke

“Whenever I meet people for the first time, I get them to talk for ten minutes. Then I size them up from the exact opposite perspective of all they’ve told me. Do you think that’s crazy?
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “I’d guess your method works quite well.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“Stick Boy liked Match Girl,
He liked her a lot.
He liked her cute figure,
he thought she was hot.

But could a flame ever burn
for a match and a stick?
It did quite literally;
he burned up quick.”
― Tim Burton, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories

“Truth suffers from too much analysis.

-Ancient Fremen Saying”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.”
― Margaret Atwood, Good Bones and Simple Murders

“Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Sooner or later, everything turns into television.”
― J.G. Ballard

“I sometimes think it would be beneficial if people thought of each other as “historical factorials.” Thus, (Myrtle!) would be understood not just as present-day Myrtle but as the product of all her past experiences.”
― John Allen Paulos, Beyond Numeracy: Ruminations of a Numbers Man

“I had come to appreciate the reality of solitude and the illusion of community that bars provide.”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“It is a truism among researchers into smell that all human subjects behave as if they themselves do not smell like humans, because all humans smell bad.”
― Lyall Watson, Jacobson's Organ: And the Remarkable Nature of Smell

“When we read, it is not ours to absorb all that is written. Our thoughts are jealous and they constantly blank out the thoughts of others, for there is not room enough in us for two scents at one time.”
― Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words

“Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.”
― Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose

“A moderate silence ensued. A neutral-to-slightly-positive silence. True, silence is still silence, except when you think about it too much.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka