I kind of hate when authors put quotes at the front of their books, for no real reason other than it looks stupid. Having said that though, I wouldn't mind some of these if I were to put them at the front of my book, but then I would have to hurt myself.
The pure products of America go crazy.
- William Carlos Williams
Mankind is unkind, man.
- Weedeater, "God Luck & Good Speed"
I put mine on the back:
@Brandon - that's awesome
@Brandon - brilliant!
" Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes." --William Gibson -
That makes me want to shoplift Brandon.
" Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes." --William Gibson -
I am in fact surrounded by assholes, or maybe I'm just incredibly cynical. Does anyone else have a problem of just plain not liking people?
^ Reminds me of the South Park episode haha.
When my mother watched the episode she emailed me saying that Stan was the absolute depiction of me...
I am in fact surrounded by assholes, or maybe I'm just incredibly cynical. Does anyone else have a problem of just plain not liking people?
Yes!! Although I'm still waiting for an appropriate explanation as to why it's a "problem". Why can't I just not like someone, for the simple reason that at least one thing about them shits me to tears!? Apparently that makes me an arsehole. Go figure.
I'm still waiting for an appropriate explanation as to why it's a "problem".
I couldn't agree more; I referred to it as a problem simply because my mother does. I have a grand total of two friends, and I'm completely okay with that. When I've presented her with studies on how a large number of involved relationships increases depression, she calls me a hermit.
That sounds uncannily familiar, Raelyn.
My cat is a better companion than most people. She listens without interrupting, and I know she genuinely likes me. People in my life like that? Shit, I could count them on one hand...
As far as Renfield's initial post goes - I disagree. I really like quotes in the front of books, simply because I think they can establish a theme really well from the get-go. As in, you (as a reader) know what you're about to get yourself into.
Another quote that I absolutely love. From the Peanuts comic strip (Linus).
“I love mankind, it's people I can't stand.”
― Charles M. Schulz
@Raelyn - I grew up a loner. Didn't have what I would call my first real friend until I was in my mid twenties and I used to wonder if that was normal. It really didn't bother me, I just wondered. Now in my mid forties, I have more friends than I have ever had. Some close. Some not so close. The one thing that I've have discovered is that when you have close friends, you share their problems. Every now and again it is nice to have somebody to lean on but shouldering my own problems is almost too much sometimes. I'm not sure I need problems by association as well. But, I guess that's the nature of the beast.
And yes ... there are a lot of people that I just don't like - for no other reason that I just don't like them and I am positive that there are more people than that that don't like me for the very same reason.
I did lines and I crossed roads, I crossed the lines of all the great state roads.
- Modest Mouse, "Trucker's Atlas"
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
-- Franz Kafka
A coward dies a thousand deaths, a soldier dies but one.
-hehe, you know, I love Motorcycle Diaries, I think he was a much better writer and wordsmith than a revolutionary. (Truth is, Che only really succeded in one revolt, and he was a pretty minor character in Cuba. Angola,and Bolivia were disasters, complete and unmitigated disasters. I was super pissed that Benicio Del Toro's Che movie cut out Angola, but I guess that Angola is where most of the evidence for "Che wasn't such a great guy" comes from, still, honesty, not hero-worship)
His appeal comes from the fact that Trotskyism lives on in him. The appeal of Troyskyism is that after you devastate a country with a civil war, instead of even trying to building a viable political system you bounce and go devastate another one.
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
-Mark Twain, a significantly less divisive figure than Ernesto Guevara.
"Fuck the page raw." Writing advice from a friend, heh.
"Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us. We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest." Marcel Proust
I'm also a member of the low tolerance for other people club. I recommend the book "Party of One: the Loner's Manifesto". There's an amusing bit in it that talks about the Victorian practice of wealthy landowners hiring "ornamental hermits" to live in little cottages on their land, all for the price of room, food and books. My immediate response was where do I sign up?
"To follow the path of wisdom has never been more urgent or more difficult. Our society is dedicated almost entirely to the celebration of ego, with all its sad fantasies about success and power, and it celebrates those very forces of greed and ignorance that are destroying the planet. It has never been more difficult to hear the unflattering voice of the truth, and never more difficult, once having heard it, to follow it: because there is nothing in the world around us that supports our choice, and the entire society in which we live seems to negate every idea of sacredness or eternal meaning. So at the time of our most acute danger, when our very future is in doubt, we as human beings find ourselves at our most bewildered, and trapped in a nightmare of our own creation." - Sogyal Rinpoch
^^^ This is brilliant. I'm sharing it.
Please do :)
I hate writing. I just want story. Story and a little music.
-- Joe Hill
Kill a man, and you're a murderer. Kill a million, you are a conqourer. Kill them all, and you are God- Jean Roustade
"Life is no way to treat an animal."
Vonnegut.
What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy? -Jeanette Winterson
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is they don't stifle enough of them." - Flannery O'Connor
"I have been your age, you have never been mine. Pay attention." - Ice T
"As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure I'm going to be a good one, or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says 'You are nothing', I will be a writer." - HST
There is no salvation without destruction, no hope this side of death. - Robert Jordan
"I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me." - H. P. Lovecraft
"Self doubt is the enemy of any writer"---Sylvia Plath
^^^ I need a plaque that says this. Good one.
“It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.”
― Raymond Carver
I realize that if the poems are bad
they are supposed to be bad and if they are good
they are likewise supposed to be - although there is a minor
fight to be fought
-Charles Bukowski
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies — "God damn it, you've got to be kind."
-Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
My father and I frequently discuss politics and economics, so, I'll warn you up front that this is a Nicholas Wilczynski quote and doesn't rightly belong here. He accused me of being a Communist, or at least a Socialist, but he was trapped in the dialectic and I tried to explain:
"Some people see the world in black and white. Others see it as grey. These people are all colorblind."
Economic and Political problems can only be solved on a case by case basis, depending on the social and cultural tendencies of the society in question. These societies are all different and none of them are right or wrong, they just have advantages and disadvantages, the only measure of correctness is sustainability and justice (in the sense of their recognition of human equality). These measures are variable based on social and cultural tendencies. You can say it's grey, but to do so misses out on the beauty of the diversity. These things are all colors, and it is glorious when you consider the full spectrum.
"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."
"Please leave this latrine as tidy as you found it."
(Two quotes from Slaughterhouse Five)
Just to make sure they don't seem random - I think those two are the key to the book. Meaning, we survive by denying that we feel pain, that we see ugliness.
"Do not think that you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment" -Dogen Zenji
"The gardener is a dream in the mind of the garden" - Anonymous, (not the group)
"That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be." - P. C. Hodgell
Some quotes I like that are going nowhere near anything I write.
Allen Ginsberg:
"Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."
"It isn't enough for your heart to break because everyone's heart is broken now."
"Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture."
and my personal favorite...
"Democracy! Bah! That's when I reach for my feather boa!"
Hahaha! (that was for the feather boa!)
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
-M.W.
Who is MW?
Marianne Williamson
I would imagine that if you could understand Morse code, a tap dancer would drive you crazy.
- Mitch Hedberg
Oh wow, these are serious quotes from serious people...
My bad...
All time favorite quote:
'Don't have to bump this, but please respect it.'
- Tupac... Makavelli...
"Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit."
-Norman Mailer
"Motherfucker, I said with cheese."
-Carjacker at the burger joint in Menace II Society
"When I give food to the poor they call me a saint; when I ask why the poor have no food they call me a communist."
-Hélder Câmara
I get to go to lots of overseas places, like Canada.
- Britney Spears, on Blender Magazine (April 2004)
The only happy artist is a dead artist, because only then you can't change. After I die, I'll probably come back as a paintbrush.
- Sylvestor Stallone, Actor
I have opinions of my own --strong opinions-- but I don't always agree with them.
- George Bush
Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that but not with all those flies and death and stuff.
- Mariah Carey, pop singer
I'm so smart now. Everyone's always like 'take your top off'. Sorry, NO! They always want to get that money shot. I'm not stupid.
- Paris Hilton
Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life.
- Brooke Shields
Sometimes you create a character so you can slip inside someone else's skin, and sometimes it feels like you're just suffocating inside your own.
-- Tom Piccirilli
Trying to become another persons equal does not always mean being rising to their level. Some times it means lowering youself to theirs.
-Jose F. Diaz
Yeah, I said that shit.
"Taking off one's pants in public can cause quite a stir. Especially if there are children around."
--Daniel Gonzales
Yeah, I did that shit.
I see what you did there Danny. Figuratively of course.
