“Here’s the deal. Willi’s bought the rights to a paperback best-seller called The White Slaver. It’s a piece of formulized shit written for illiterate fourteen-year-olds and the kind of lobotomized housewife that lines up to buy the new Harlequin romances each month. Jack-off material for intellectual quadriplegics. Naturally”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Carrion Comfort
“Here’s the deal. Willi’s bought the rights to a paperback best-seller called The White Slaver. It’s a piece of formulized shit written for illiterate fourteen-year-olds and the kind of lobotomized housewife that lines up to buy the new Harlequin romances each month. Jack-off material for intellectual quadriplegics. Naturally it sold about three million copies. We”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Carrion Comfort
“a degree in psychiatry merely qualifies one to begin learning about the intricacies and foibles of the human personality.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Carrion Comfort
“Don’t you see, Anthony? For all the evangelicals’ talk about this nation being founded on religious principles…this being a Christian nation and all…most of the Founding Fathers were like Jefferson…atheists, pointy-headed intellectuals, Unitarians…”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Carrion Comfort
“He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Carrion Comfort
“Natalie’s father had a saying for that behavior—Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Carrion Comfort
“All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Carrion Comfort
“To the Germans, these Jewish foreigners, so different from the local bourgeois Jews who had, with discipline, allowed themselves t be rounded up and slaughtered, seemed suspect: too quick, too energetic, dirty, tattered, proud, unpredictable, primitive, too "Russian". The Jews found it impossible, and at the same time necessary, to distinguish the headhunters they had eluded and on whom they had taken passionate revenge from these shy, reserved old people, these blond, polite children who looked in at the station doors as if through the bars of the zoo. They aren't the ones, no; but it's their father, their teachers, their sons, themselves yesterday and tomorrow. How to resolve the puzzle? It can't be solved. Leave: as soon as possible. This land, too, is searing under our feet, this neat, trim town, loving order, this sweet bland air of full summer also scorches Leave, leave: we haven't come from the depths of Polessia in order to go to sleep in the Wartesaal of Plauen-am-Elster, and to while away our waiting with group snapshots and the Red Cross soup.”
― Primo Levi, quote from If Not Now, When?
“Weapons are the tools of violence; all decent men detest them. Weapons are the tools of fear; a decent man will avoid them except in the direst necessity and, if compelled, will use them only with the utmost restraint. Peace is the highest value.… He enters a battle gravely, with sorrow and with great compassion, as if he were attending a funeral. (ch. 31) That”
― Huston Smith, quote from The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions
“Le he pedido a Bill que me lo explicara y él me ha hablado del crecimiento demográfico y la Iglesia católica y la lluvia ácida y la destrucción de los bosques tropicales para conseguir más comida. Todo el mundo discute sobre el tema, me ha dicho. Los economistas y hombres de negocios dicen que nada va mal. Los ecologistas y expertos en población dicen que se acerca el final. Mientras discuten, las cosas seguirán con la misma tendencia hasta que lleguemos al punto sin retorno, que será en algún momento de los próximos cien años. A partir de entonces, no habrá más espacio al aire libre porque cada centímetro cuadrado de tierra será necesario para producir comida.”
― Sheri S. Tepper, quote from Beauty
“They decided now, talking it over in their tight little two-and-quarter room flat, that most people who call themselves 'truth seekers' - persons who scurry about chattering of Truth as though it were a tangible seperable thing, like houses or salt or bread - did not so much desire to find Truth as to cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers quested the 'secret of life' in laboratories which did not seem to be provided wtih Bunsen flames or reagents; or they went, at great expense and much discomfort from hot trains and undesirable snakes, to Himalayan monasteries, to learn from unaseptic sages that the Mind can do all sorts of edifying things if one will but spend thirty or forty years in eating rice and gazing on one's navel.
To these high matters Martin responded, 'Rot!' He insisted that there is no Truth but only many truths; that Truth is not a colored bird to be chased among the rocks and captured by its tail, but a skeptical attitude toward life. (260)”
― Sinclair Lewis, quote from Arrowsmith
“And you, a king’s daughter, who willingly gave herself to me—who brought me to her bed? Are you so high and pure?” She”
― Tad Williams, quote from To Green Angel Tower, Part 1
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