Quotes
AMERICAN PSYCHO by Bret Easton Ellis
“Everything failed to subdue me. Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling in love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn’t bore me, obviously enough, was how much money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did. There wasn’t a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being — flesh, blood, skin, hair — but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn’t figure out why — I couldn’t put my finger on it. The only thing that calmed me was the satisfying sound of ice being dropped into a glass of J&B.” pg.282
“…where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in…this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…” pg.375
“…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel fresh flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have not surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this — and I have, countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed — and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing…” pg.377
THIS BOY’S LIFE by Tobias Wolff
“Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing.” pg.230
“When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling or dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever.” pg. 286
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT by Norman Maclean
“Poets talk about ‘spots of time,’ but it is really fisherman who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish and gone.” pg.44
“Sometimes a thing in front of you is so big you don’t know whether to comprehend it by first getting a dim sense of the whole and then fitting in the pieces or by adding up the pieces until something calls out what it is.” pg.53
“Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willing and needs it badly.
So it is that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto supply shop over town where they say, ‘Sorry, we are just out of that part.’”
MONEYBALL by Michael Lewis
“The Yankees understood what New York understood, that there was no shame in buying success, and maybe because of their lack of shame they did what they did better than anyone in the business.” pg.xii
PARLIAMENT OF WHORES by P.J. O’Rourke
“Democrats are the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and they get elected and prove it.”
“The Democrats said, “‘We don’t know what’s wrong with America, but we can fix it. The Republicans said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with America, and we can fix that.”
“Washington is an early-rising, hardworking city. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.”
THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
“You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it.” pg. 152
“No matter how vulgar a hotel is, the bar is always nice.” pg.248
RANDOM
“A ‘consensus’ is what everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually”
“If you want to study a river you don’t take out a bucketful of water and stare at in on the shore. A river is not its water, and by taking the water out of the river, you lose the essential quality of river, which is its motion, its activity, its flow.” — Alan Watts
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” — Charles Darwin
“One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.” – Chinua Achebe
“Formulas can only inhibit freedom, externally dictated prescriptions only squelch creativity and assure mediocrity. Bear in mind that the freedom that accrues from self-knowledge cannot be acquired through strict adherence to a formula; we do not suddenly “become” free, we simply “are” free.
Learning is definitely not mere imitation, nor is it the ability to accumulate and regurgitate fixed knowledge. Learning is a constant process of discovery, a process without end.” — Bruce Lee
“..media is increasingly less just a source of information. And it is increasingly a site of coordination.” — Clay Shirky
“In a world where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap, in a world of media where the former audience are now increasingly full participants, in that world, media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals. It is more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups.” – Clay Shirky
“A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” — Ernest Hemingway
“I want to be totally used up when I die. I don’t want them to bury any unused parts.” — George Bernard Shaw
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” — George Bernard Shaw
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” – Thoreau
“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” — John Gardner
“You do not truly know someone until you fight them.” – Matrix Reloaded
“Fear is your best friend or your worst enemy. It’s like fire. If you can control it, it can cook for you; it can heat your house. If you can’t control it, it will burn everything around you and destroy you. If you can control your fear, it makes you more alert, like a deer coming across the lawn.” — Mike Tyson
“…most movements, most leadership that we’re doing is about finding a group that’s disconnected but already has a yearning. Not persuading people to want something they don’t have yet. — Seth Godin
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” – Sun Tzu
“When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.” — Walter Lippman
“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.” — Henry David Thoreau
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.”– Isak Dinesen
“Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.” — Woody Allen, “Manhattan”
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up” - Thomas Edison
“But the books you like must also be read with shudders and gasps… Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain -the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed -then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you will have contributed something of your own blood.” — Vladimir Nabokov
“One indication of the validity of a principle is the vigor and persistence with which it is opposed…In any field, if people see that a principle is obvious nonsense and easy to refute, they tend to ignore it. On the other hand, if the principle is difficult to refute and it causes them to question some of their own basic assumptions with which their names may be identified, they have to go out of their way to find something wrong with it.” — Charles Osgood
“The digital space is an economy after all. People are creating, exchanging and capturing value, as they would in any marketplace. But this is a gift economy, where the transactions are shot through with cultural content and creation. In a gift economy, value tends to move not in little “tit for tat” transactions, but in long loops, moving between consumers before returning, augmented, to the corporation.” – Grant McCracken
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” – Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize
