Quotes

Words that were said that I’d like to remember.


“What’s wrong and what’s exactly the matter?”

Bob Dylan, Ballad in Plain D


“How embarrassing… a house full of condiments and no food.”

Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club


“At least she wasn’t boring. And that’s a good thing. I mean, the world’s full of things we can’t explain, and somebody’s got to fill that vacuum. Better to have somebody who isn’t boring than somebody who is. Right?”

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle


“This is what you get
This is what you get
This is what you get
When you mess with us”

Karma Police, Radiohead


“And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.”

“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”

1984, George Orwell


“When reality clashes so violently with intuition, people are shaken.”

Marilyn von Savant, from the book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers


“How did you go bankrupt?”
“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises


“A man who understands the weather only in terms of golf is participating in a chronic public insanity that either he or his descendants will be bound to realize as suffering.”

Wendell Berry, Think Small, From the 16th edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, June 1975


“You still will get this. I had an aged Volvo once (this is not irrelevant), and I was on holiday in Ireland in the summer, as I usually am, and the boot — which you call the trunk — jammed. I went in to the local garage man in my Kerry village and said, “I suppose I should take it to a Volvo dealer.” He lifted up a monkey wrench and hit the back of the car where the boot was jammed with a great belt. As he hit it (and it did spring open), he said, “In matters like this, Volvo dealers wield no special magic.”

Roy Foster, episode 147 of Conversations with Tyler


“Democracy now favors the public, and the public, at every level of social and political life, seems to want out.”

The Revolt of the Republic, Martin Gurri