Mike > Mike's Quotes

“It’s strange how you’re sometimes forced to assume an unsympathetic view of yourself through borrowed eyes.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“We’re just two punks, Frank. God kissed us on the brow that night. He gave us all that two people can ever have and we just weren’t the kind that could have it. [I]t’s a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces. That’s what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords.”
― James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice

“Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)”
― steven pinker

“Fiction is empathy technology.”
― Steven Pinker

“I'm not going anywhere. I hope. It's been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost.
But I wouldn't have missed it for the world.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Some parents let their young kids win at games, but mine never did.

I don't think it was because they were particularly competitive, they just wanted to teach me a valuable lesson.

Life is mostly just learning how to lose.”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 3

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”
― Ernest Hemingway

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.”
― Richard Wright, Native Son

“All literature is protest.”
― Richard Wright

“I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em...”
― Richard Wright, Native Son

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language, coming to know one's own belief system in someone else's system.”
― Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays