Something People Quotes (page 36)
This highest kind of truth is never something the artist takes as given. It's not his point of departure but his goal. Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient characteristic of art is its radical openness to persuasion. Even those beliefs he's surest of, the artist puts under pressure to see if they will stand.
John Gardner
Pearl Jam is a band I have a lot of respect for. Nirvana and Sonic Youth I feel the same way about. Mumford & Sons, My Morning Jacket, Wilco, Givers, and Foo Fighters are just some of my favorites. I respect bands that give me something of themselves that I can feel. ("Posing" bands turn me off generally speaking.) It all has to do with a feeling I have about them. That is what music is to me, a feeling. It's similar with people too.
Neil Young
Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights...How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before!...There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Right. But do you think I could face my children otherwise? You know what's going to happen as well as I do, Jack, and I hope and pray I can get Jem and Scout through it without bitterness, and most of all, without catching Maycomb's usual disease. Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand... I just hope that Jem and Scout come to me for their answers instead of listening to the town. I hope they trust me...
Harper Lee
I learned to look more upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side, and to consider what I enjoyed, rather than what I wanted : and this gave me sometimes such secret comforts, that I cannot express them ; and which I take notice of here, to put those discontented people in mind of it, who cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them, because they see and covet something that he has not given them. All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from...
Daniel Defoe
The problem in this case was you can't be a middle-aged virgin in America without something being wrong with you. People can't conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can't conceive in themselves. Instead of believing you're stronger, it's so much easier to imagine you're weaker.
Chuck Palahniuk
When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.
J. D. Salinger
There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping...
Charles Bukowski
The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise--she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression--then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.'I'm p-paralyzed with happiness.'She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the...
F. Scott Fitzgerald