David Faulkner

“Tired but happy. There is nothing more beautiful than some straightforward, concrete, generally useful trade...Intellectual labor tears a man out of human society. A craft, on the other hand, leads him towards men. What a pity I can no longer work in the workshop or in the garden.”
― Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

“The Minds did not assume such distinctions; to them, there was no cutoff between the two. Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra. It was all more than they ever expected the mammal brain to cope with. He recalled what Sma had said to him, long long ago back in that new beginning (itself the product of so much guilt and pain); that they dealt in the intrinsically untoward, where rules were forged as you went along and were never the same twice anyway, where just by the nature of things nothing could be known or predicted or even judged with any real certainty. It all sounded very sophisticated and abstract and challenging to work with, but in the end it came down to people and problems.”
― Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

“Over and over, author and book remind me of how little I understood as a youth and how limited an effect literature may have. A sobering thought.”
― Günter Grass, Peeling the Onion

“As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant: writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling