J! > J!'s Quotes

“He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
― George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

“Mankind is Noodlekind.”
― MOMOFUKU ANDO, Insutanto Rāmen Hatsumeiō: Andō Momofuku Kaku Katariki

“Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another.”
― Lemony Snicket

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”
― Mark Twain

“There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.”
― W.C. Fields

“The navy has the best food until the cooks get ahold of it.”
― Anonymous

“Honesty without kindness is cruelty; kindness without honesty is manipulation.”
― Some Dude on Reddit

“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.”
― Raymond Chandler

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.”
― Raymond Chandler

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”
― Saint Francis of Assisi

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
― Henry Ford

“Vision without execution is just hallucination.”
― Henry Ford

“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”
― Sigmund Freud

“A woman should soften but not weaken a man.”
― Sigmund Freud

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Be good... and if you can't be good, be careful.”
― Ron Byron

“What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.”
― André Malraux

“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I followed all of the rules, man's and God's. And you, you followed none of them. And they all loved you more. Samuel, Father, and my... even my own wife.”
― Aidan Quinn

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

“In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor -- by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks -- that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The story is the man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent