Jimmy > Jimmy's Quotes

“If you want to think about something really funny, kiddo, consider the fact that our favorite modern bad guys became villains by serving as heroes first--to millions. It is now a necessary apprenticeship.”
― William H. Gass, The Tunnel

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“But the worst of it was, all the third-rate poets emerged unscathed; being third-rate, they didn't know good poetry from bad and consequently had no inkling of their crushing defeat.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad

“What does a mirror look at?”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“Not only did I manage to accidentally meet the man I’m investigating, I managed to accidentally have sex with him.”
― J.L. Langley, The Englor Affair

“A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.”
― Steve Martin

“I don't need a "reason" to be happy. I don't have to consult the future to know how happy I feel now.”
― Hugh Prather, Notes to Myself

“Don't strive for love, be it.”
― Hugh Prather, Notes to Myself

“To live for results would be to sentence myself to continuous frustration. My only sure reward is in my actions and not from them.”
― Hugh Prather

“It's pain that changes our lives.”
― Steve Martin, Shopgirl

“He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“This is perhaps one of the most important things I learned during this investigation: We see what we believe, and not just the contrary; and to change what we see, it is sometimes necessary to change what we believe.”
― Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge

“I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth.
Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here.

[Epitaph he composed for himself a few months before he died]”
― Johannes Kepler

“The cosmetic is cosmic.”
― Rem Koolhaas, Content

“The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.”
― Rem Koolhaas

“Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. ”
― Wallace Stevens

“The way through the world
Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.”
― Wallace Stevens

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)”
― John Muir

“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...

Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope.”
― Emil Cioran

“We don't even know if we're in this room. We could be in a turtle's dream in outer space.”
― Danny De Vito

“The years... when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything was then.”
― Carl Gustav Jung