READIN

Some quotes I've found meaningful

See my blog for more thoughts about reading.

Understanding makes the mind lazy.

-- Penelope Fitzgerald

That's the trouble with being innocent, you don't know what really happened.

-- Tomek Zaleska

Only imbeciles are innocent.

-- Orhan Pamuk

If he hadn't been so tired, ... he might have seen at the start that he was setting out on a journey that would change his life forever and chosen to turn back.

-- Orhan Pamuk

Personal density is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.

-- Kurt Mondaugen

The city is a recapitulation of the cave, by other means.

-- Hans Blumenberg

So man became, by way of his passage through the cave, the dreaming animal.

-- Hans Blumenberg

What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.

-- Orhan Pamuk

All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies.

-- Bokonon

The bastards that destroy our lives are sometimes just ourselves.

-- Robyn Hitchcock

Language speaks, because speaking is its pleasure and it can do nothing else.

-- Penelope Fitzgerald

All I wanna do is fall in love, while there's still time.

-- Robyn Hitchcock

It must have been a long time before men thought of giving a common name to the manifold objects of their senses, and of placing themselves in opposition to them.

-- Novalis

Can you win anything better than the useless rewards of a fantastical imagination! Is there any greater honor?

-- Moominpappa

Be quiet the doctor's wife said gently, let's all keep quiet, there are times when words serve no purpose, if only I, too, could weep, say everything with tears, not have to speak in order to be understood.

-- José Saramago

The gate is wide open, the madmen escape.

-- José Saramago

At first I didn't quite know what I would do with the book, other than read it over and over again. My distrust of history then was still strong, and I wanted to concentrate on the story for its own sake, rather than on the manuscript's scientific, cultural, anthropological, or 'historical' value. I was drawn to the author himself.

-- Orhan Pamuk

If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions which regulate it, you lose reality itself.

-- Slavoj Žižek

By definition anyone with ideals is a hypocrite.

-- Girl

I was born with a mind that suffers from the incurable disease of worrying precisely about what could or might have been.

-- Cipriano Algor

We say to the apathetic, Where there's a will, there's a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head.

-- José Saramago

Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream -- a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows -- is essentially poetry.

-- Michel Leiris

If we do not say all words, however absurd, we will never say the essential words.

-- José Saramago

Slugs leave trails, sheep leave droppings, bees make honey, and humans leave two things: art and garbage. Where these meet is called entertainment.

-- Robyn Hitchcock

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

-- John Stuart Mill