Wednesday, August 17, 2016

The Best Words: July/August 2016


Quotable quotes that I encountered over the past couple months.

"[In 1992] Clark had no great hope that Americans wanted their computers to educate themselves. He assumed they wanted their computers to play Nintendo and otherwise divert themselves from the poverty of their existences. The answer he finally came up with was that people wanted to watch any movies they pleased, whenever they pleased."
-Michael Lewis, The New New Thing

"In a sense the library gave me back my life. It's helped me to meet others more mature than me, people who I can discuss issues with and learn things from. I would say that just like the body needs food, the soul needs books."
-Mitch Ziems

"The Devil's at his strongest when we're looking the other way. Like a program running in the background."
-Mr. Robot

“A wholesome sense of humor will be a safety valve that will enable you to apply the lighter touch to heavy problems and to learn some lessons in problem solving that ‘sweat and tears’ often fail to dissolve”

-Hugh B. Brown

“It was rules that got you where you were and more rules that kept you there.”

“When you're whole and unharmed, no matter how scared you are there's always the feeling that nobody's going to touch you, really. It's only when the pain begins that you realize you're vulnerable.”
-Jack Ketchum, Hide and Seek

“Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

“If people agreed suddenly to be sincere, everything would go to the devil, would fall to pieces...only savages and animals are sincere.”
-Anton Chekhov

“Moses knew that he couldn't create a society of free men from a generation born as slaves. Moses kept his people wandering until the previous generation had died."
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club 2

“Don't ever call me mad, Mycroft. I'm not mad. I'm just...well, differently moraled, that's all.”

“Did the memory erasure device work, Uncle?"
"The what?"
"The memory erasure device. You were testing it when I last saw you."
"Don't know what you're talking about, dear girl.”

“Religion isn't the cause of wars, it's the excuse.”

“I don't believe in coincidences."
"Neither do I. That's a coincidence, isn't it?”

“The industrial age had only just begun; the planet had reached its Best Before date.”
-Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

"What website did you meet on? OKStupid? Haha, nailed it!"
-Playing House

“Don’t be afraid to laugh. A person without a sense of humor misses much of the joy of living”
-David O. McKay

"I've done everything for him! I changed religions, for God's sake! I'm not going to Heaven now! What more does he want?"
-Wonderfalls

“I remember once when he and I arrived at a country house where the going threatened to be sticky, Jeeves, as we alighted, murmured in my ear the words ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came, sir’, and at the time I could make nothing of the crack. Subsequent inquiry, however, revealed that this Roland was one of those knights of the Middle Ages who spent their time wandering to and fro, and that on fetching up one evening at a dump known as the Dark Tower he had scratched the chin a bit dubiously, not liking the look of things.”

“Irishmen are poets. They talk about their souls and mist and so on.”
-P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season

“Break me from this hold as I unfold blood eagle wings”
-Anthrax

“I understand why you love this gun thing. It completely detaches you from the guilt of your actions!”
-The Brothers Grimsby

“He kept his motor running, but he never kept it clean.”
-Skid Row, “18 and Life”

“Why do they always build banks to look like temples, despite the fact that several major religions a) are canonically against what they do inside and b) bank there?”

“The first impression it gave Moist was: this is Hell on the day they couldn’t find the matches.”
“People don’t like change. But make the change fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.”

“It was sad, like those businessmen who came to work in serious clothes but wore colorful ties in a mad, desperate attempt to show there was a free spirit in there somewhere.”

“A weapon you held and didn't know how to use belonged to your enemy.”

“You get a wonderful view from the point of no return.”

“Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms: in the dark and based on bulls**t.”
-Terry Pratchett, Making Money

“It is some advantage to lead a primitive life if only to learn what are the necessities...Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts are not only dispensable but positive hindrances.”
-Thoreau

“I don’t have a life. I have a schedule.”
-Parenthood

“What I tend to see happening more and more is people retreating into their own corners. People seem scared to get things wrong or be shouted at so they form villages in which they agree with every other member, and maybe they go out and shout at the people in the next village for fun, but there’s no interchange of ideas going on. I think we have to encourage the idea that you’re allowed to think things. I have thought a great many stupid things over the years, and I can tell you that there’s not one stupid thing that I ever thought where I changed my mind because someone shouted at me or threatened to kill me. On the other hand, having great discussions with good friends, possibly over a drink, has definitely changed my mind and made me try to do better. You’re allowed to do better, but we have to let people do better.”

”I think each of us tends to take something and use that as the place where you begin making your art. If you’re going to make good art, it’s likely that you’re going to go to the place where things are dark, and use that to shine light into your life and, if you’re doing it right, into other people’s lives as well. For Terry [Pratchett], it was always anger. There was a deep rage in him that allowed him to create. For me, it tends to be sorrow or loneliness or confusion.”
-Neil Gaiman

“Self-conscious, uncertain, I'm showered with the dust
The spirit enters into me, and I submit to trust
Smash the radio
(No outside voices here)
Smash the watch
(Cannot tear the day to shreds)
Smash the camera
(Cannot steal away the spirits)
The rhythm is around me
The rhythm has control
The rhythm is inside me
The rhythm has my soul”
-Peter Gabriel, “The Rhythm of the Heat”

“Satan can kiss my ass!”

“Spaghetti and meatballs is just too much excitement!”
-The Gilmore Girls

“It was Taine who said: ‘Democracies defeat themselves.’ Perhaps I haven’t got that quotation right. It doesn’t seem to mean much.”

“[Trout fishing] is nothing but a constant series of compromises with one’s better nature, what with sneaking about pretending to be something that one is not, trying to fool the fish into thinking one thing when just the reverse is true, and in general behaving in an underhanded and tricky manner throughout the day.”

“It is only recently that doctors have discovered that we have many more elements in our systems than was originally thought. Whether we have always had them and just didn’t know it, or whether they were brought there and left by some people who wanted to get rid of them has not been decided.”
-Robert Benchley


-Compiled by Phony McFakename

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