Quotes

Here are some quotes that I like (by other people, most of them dead). Don't quote me on these.

• "What a figment of the imagination human beings are! What a novelty, what monsters! Chaotic, contradictory, prodigious, judging everything, mindless worm of the earth, storehouse of truth, cesspool of uncertainty and error, glory and reject of the universe." -Blaise Pascal, Pensées
• "Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them." -Alfred North Whitehead
• "One thing about holding up banks is you're mostly robbing women, so you don't ever want to be rude. About 80% of the time, so long as you're not rude, the women don't mind when you hold up the bank; probably it breaks up the monotony for them. Of course there are exceptions; about 20% have a bad outlook." -Nico Walker, Cherry
• "That being said, one person's "barbarian" is another person's "just doing what everybody else is doing."" -Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
• "I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again." -Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
• "Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one's own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity." -Roberto Bolaño, 2666
• "To appease you, I modified the scene so that the two of you appear more as friends and less as lovers or nemesises." -Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
• "No, it was not superstition, it was a sense of beauty that cured her of her depression and imbued her with a new will to live. The birds of fortuity had alighted once more on her shoulders. There were tears in her eyes, and she was unutterably happy to hear him breathing at her side." -Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• "My passions are extremely strong, and while I am under their sway nothing can equal my impetuosity. I am amenable to no restraint, respect, fear, or decorum. I am cynical, bold, violent, and daring. No shame can stop me, no fear or danger alarm me. Except for the one object in my mind the universe for me is non-existent. But all this lasts only a moment; and the next moment plunges me into annihilation." -Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
• “Billy took off his tri-focals and his coat and his necktie and his shoes, and he closed the venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay down on the outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears came instead. Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was jiggled as he wept.” -Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
• "... for I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time." -James Baldwin, Nothing Personal
• "His skin became covered with a thin moss, similar to that which flourished on the antique vest that he never took off, and his breath exhaled the odor of a sleeping animal." -Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
• "Looking at a pot, for example, or thinking of a pot, at one of Mr Knott’s pots, of one of Mr Knott’s pots, it was in vain that Watt said, Pot, pot. Well, perhaps not quite in vain, but very nearly. For it was not a pot, the more he looked, the more he reflected, the more he felt sure of that, that it was not a pot at all. It resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say, Pot, pot, and be comforted. It was in vain that it answered, with unexceptionable adequacy, all the purposes, and performed all the offices, of a pot, it was not a pot. And it was just this hairbreadth departure from the nature of a true pot that so excruciated Watt. For if the approximation had been less close, then Watt would have been less anguished." -Samuel Beckett, Watt
• "A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. Like other gunners, the writer must cultivate patience, working many covers to bring down one partridge." -E. B. White, Elements of Style