A Reader's Quote Library

Quotes Found While Reading, Indexed by Tags

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"It's so important to try to relax and try to forget about why you're there and the tension. In the same way, you should do the activities that you used to do as a child, as a youth that made you relax and laugh and have fun. If you repeat those activities, you will get some of the same faith."

- Chess World Champion Magnus Carlsen's father, on decompressing from the stress of chess championships, in the film 'Magnus' (2016)

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"In the spring of ‘68 we had the riots at Columbia, with radical students occupying the campus (“Kirk Must Go!”) and classes being suspended (“Shut it Down!”) and final exams called off and nightly confrontations with the police, in the course of which a good many undergraduate skulls were laid open and much high-quality blood leaked into the gutters. How funny it is that I pushed that event out of my mind, when of all the things I’ve listed here it was the only one I actually experienced at first hand. Standing at Broadway and 116th Street watching platoons of cold-eyed fuzz go racing toward Butler Library. (“Fuzz” is what we called policemen before we started calling them “pigs,” which happened a little later that same year.) Holding my hand aloft in the forked V-for-Peace gesture and screaming idiotic slogans with the best of them. Cowering in the lobby of Furnald Hall as the blue-clad nightstick brigade went on its rampage. Debating tactics with a ragged-bearded SDS gauleiter who finally spat in my face and called me a stinking liberal fink. Watching sweet Barnard girls ripping open their blouses and waving their bare breasts at horny, exasperated cops, while simultaneously shrieking ferocious Anglo-Saxonisms that the Barnard girls of my own remote era hadn’t ever heard. Watching a group of young shaggy Columbia men ritualistically pissing on a pile of research documents that had been liberated from the filing cabinet of some hapless instructor going for his doctorate. It was then that I knew there could be no hope for mankind, when even the best of us were capable of going berserk in the cause of love and peace and human equality. On those dark nights I looked into many minds and found only hysteria and madness, and once, in despair, realizing I was living in a world where two factions of lunatics were battling for control of the asylum, I went off to vomit in Riverside Park after a particularly bloody riot and was caught unawares (me, caught unawares!) by a lithe 14-year-old black mugger who smilingly relieved me of $22."

- Robert Silverberg, 'Dying Inside'

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"Insatiable as a flame, I burn and consume myself."

- Ecce Homo (Behold the Man),

Friedrich Nietzsche

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"How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call the progress of the world, and lay their words upon men's heartstrings again without becoming the garment of religion as in old times."

- W.B. Yeats

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"L'esprit est une souffle, la pensée un poids."

( The mind is a breath, the thought a weight.)

- Paul Valéry

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"A poet should be easy to impress and impossible to convince."

- 'The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought To Live Since The Death of God' by Peter Watson, discussing the poetic principles of Paul Valéry

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“The nightsea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a shore that may not exist and couldn’t be reached if it did.” - John Barth

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"I see others just like me Why do they not try to escape?"

- Paper Cuts, Nirvana

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"From their loneliness, these descents are a liberation..."

- Jacques Cousteau, A World Without Sun

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"The industrial historian Charles R. Morris sums up the paradox of Colt pithily: “One half of Sam Colt was the buncoing fabulist, the walking bonfire of other people's money, the drinker and carouser; the other half was a truly gifted inventor.”

Colt was also increasingly showing himself to be a gifted merchant, combining his natural flair for persuasion with a prescient grasp of mass marketing. He branded his guns not only with his name, but with engravings that were pressure-rolled onto the cylinders. The scenes he chose for these engravings—one showed a stagecoach holdup, men facing off with pistols, several on the ground wounded or dead—indicate how well he understood his gun's appeal by 1840. Not only did the engravings associate his revolvers with self-defense and derring-do, they verified them as authentic Colts amid the onslaught of imitation revolvers he correctly assumed was coming. Nor did he neglect the presentation of the guns. Each came in a handsome mahogany box, lined in velvet, with a beveled lid and a nameplate. An even better idea, which Colt arrived at later, would be putting some of the guns inside false books, a gimmick, but one that hinted knowingly at the future of these guns. *Law for Self Defense* was the title on the spine of one of these books. Other titles included *The Tourists Companion* and *The Common Law of Texas*."

- Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-shooter that Changed America,

By Jim Rasenberger

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"To understand, you don't have to agree. But I think to disagree, you have to understand. Otherwise, you're just sort of rejecting."

- Gary Lachman

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"but see how close you can come without

already being there,"

- Jorie Graham, 'Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts'

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"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true."

-James Cabell

As quoted in the Topps The X-Files comic #15 Home of the Brave - part 1

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"Exceeding music must take the place Of empty heaven and its hymns."

- Wallace Stevens

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“Poetry . . . is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos”

- I. A. Richards

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*There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor's life."

- Richard Henry Dana

'Two Years Before the Mast'

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“We felt the possibility of a new religion, with poetic emotion as its essential quality”

- Paul Valéry