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Quotes by Writer
"To grow you must not gain something but instead get rid of all the things that have held you back."
78
"You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists."
78
"Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great."
78
"How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean."
78
"We're so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks-we're involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don't get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?"
78
"What can be more clear and sound in explanation, than the love of a parent to his child?"
77
"On account of its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it."
77
"Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car."
77
"Don't blame you," said Marvin and counted five hundred and ninety-seven thousand million sheep before falling asleep again a second later."
77
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."
77
"Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it."
76
"A university is a college with a stadium seating over 40,000."
76
"My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious."
76
"That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing."
76
"Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."
76
"But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?""Yes, I am fond of history.""I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all - it is very tiresome."
76
"It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty."
76
"Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way."
76
"They said you were hard and cold and unfeeling. But it's true...I am, in the sense they mean-only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?""What did they mean about you?""Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that .'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality."
76
"People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies."
76
"A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short."
76
"Nurses came to his house to work with Morrie's withering legs.. bending them back and forth as if pumping water from a well.. He met with meditation teachers, and closed his eyes and narrowed his thoughts until his world shrunk down to a single breath, in and out, in and out."
76
"A book is a gift you can open again and again."
75
"It's easy to keep issuing blame to Republicans or the president."
75
"I'm an underdog person, so I align myself with those who seem to be not considered valuable in polite society."
75
"Don't play for safety - it's the most dangerous thing in the world."
75
"Her smile increased. She had perfect white regular teeth; Irish, Juliana decided. Only Irish blood could give that jawline such femininity."
75
"Love often leads on to ambition, but seldom does one return from ambition to love."
75
"When, in the third book, we do learn the identity of the Blue Rose murderer, the information comes in a muted, nearly off-hand manner, and the man has died long before."
75
"The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it's presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the term in general."
75
"The truth is that neither British nor American imperialism was or is idealistic. It has always been driven by economic or strategic interests."
75
"Don't wait. The time will never be just right."
75
"All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning."
75
"The tree of possibilities: life as it reveals itself to a man arriving, astonished, at the threshold of his adult life: an abundant treetop canopy filled with bees singing. And he thinks he understands why she never showed him the letters: she wanted to hear the murmur of the tree by herself, without him, because he, Jean-Marc, represented the abolition of all possibilities, he was the reduction, (even though it was a happy reduction) of her life to a single possibility."
75
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