“I think what you ought to do is start by thinking about the simplest things and go from there. For example, you could stand on a street corner somewhere day after day and look at the people who come by. You’re not in any hurry to decide anything. It may be tough, but sometimes you’ve got to just stop and take time. You ought to train yourself to look at things with your own eyes until something becomes clear. And don’t be afraid of putting some time into it. Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge.”
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles
“You can’t fuck with the sky and expect nothing to happen.”
Paul Auster, Moon Palace
“The mask eats the face.”
John Updike
“If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”
John Steinbeck
“I think he was a gangster.” “Why you say that?” Miss Izi asked. “He had a lot of pockmarks on his face.” “That’s nothing,” Miss Izi said. “That could be from learning to use a fork.”_
James McBride, Deacon King Kong
“Obsessions are the only thing that matter.”
Patricia Highsmith
“If it’s in a word, or in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook.”
Mister Babadook
“There are 6 or 7 good restaurants in Rome and the rest is poison.”
Stranger overheard in a coffee shop
“Oh that’s my snake’s name!”
That same stranger overheard in a coffee shop
“If we all had to wear uniforms it would allow the truly well-dressed to stand forth.”
Deak Nabers (one of my English professors)
“I’ve kiboshed before and I WILL kibosh again.”
Crazy Joe Davola, Seinfeld
“The nice thing about things that are urgent is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.”
Amos Tversky
Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover when it’s too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
“People don’t want quarter inch drills. They want quarter inch holes.” —
Theodore Levitt
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of those stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
Richard Dawkins