Quite Quotes (page 65)
This is the mythosphere. It's made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs, legends, myths and hopes, that are generated here on Earth. As you can see, it's constantly growing and moving as people invent new tales to tell or find new things to believe. The older strands move out to become these spirals, where things tend to become quite crude and dangerous. They've hardened off, you see.
Diana Wynne Jones
Clearly,” I said, “we should choose not to have good sense, if that good sense contributes to our misery.”
Everyone agreed with me, and yet I found no one who wanted to accept the bargain of becoming ignorant in order to become content. From this I concluded that though we greatly value happiness, we place even greater value on reason.
But yet, upon reflection, it seems that to prefer reason to happiness is to be quite insane.
Voltaire
I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone...
Raymond Chandler
This is how I feel, I can't name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?-- this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it's perilously close to 'Do you like me? Please like me,' which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene.
David Foster Wallace
November is the most disagreeable month in the whole ear,' said Margaret, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frostbitten garden.'That's the reason I was born in it,' observed Jo pensively, quite unconscious of the blot on her nose.'If something very pleasant should happen now, we should think it a delightful month,' said Beth, who took a hopeful view of everything, even November.
Louisa May Alcott
What I am really writing about, what I have always written about, is the idea of human freedom, human community, the real world which makes both possible, and the new technocratic industrial state which threatens the existence of all three. Life and death, that's my subject, and always has been - if the reader will look beyond the assumptions of lazy critics and actually read what I have written. Which also means, quite often, reading between the lines: I am a comic writer and the generation...
Edward Abbey
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the...
Bertrand Russell