Just Quotes (page 407)
He was part of us and when he died all the actions stopped dead, and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. i've never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million actions the night he passed on?
Ray Bradbury
Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. ... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them.
Harry Crews
[I]t seems to be just as foolish to say, 'I imagine, in order to understand more clearly what I am,' as to say, 'I am now clearly awake and I see something true, but because I do not yet see it clearly enough I shall fall asleep so that my dreams will represent it to me more truly and clearly.
Rene Descartes
They take the circuits out of people’s brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. I’m sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You don’t have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do.
Haruki Murakami
He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. He put his life in my hands. So that made me do something I didn't think I could do.... If you trust him, you can do things. If he's decided that something should happen, then he's just going to make it happen. (Elizabeth Holmes)
Walter Isaacson