Quotes from Giles Goat-Boy

“Self knowledge is always bad news.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“When you look at this mirror I hope you'll remember that there's always another way of seeing things: that's the beginning of wisdom.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“And never mind that the lessons he meant to be helpful, his students always make people miserable with, and flunk anybody that disagrees with them!”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“remember that there's always another way of seeing things: that's the beginning of wisdom.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence...
'Look how we been acting,' he invited me, referring to intercollegiate political squabbles; 'the colleges are spoilt kids, and the whole University a mindless baby, ja? Okay: so weren't we all once, Enos Enoch too? And we got to admit that the University's a precocious kid. If the history of life on campus hadn't been so childish, we couldn't hope it'll reach maturity.' Studentdom had passed already, he asserted, from a disorganized, pre-literate infancy (of which Croaker was a modern representative, nothing ever being entirely lost) through a rather brilliant early childhood ('...ancient Lykeion, Remus, T'ang...') which formed its basic and somewhat contradictory character; it had undergone a period of naive general faith in parental authority (by which he meant early Founderism) and survived critical spells of disillusionment, skepticism, rationalism, willfulness, self-criticism, violence, disorientation, despair, and the like--all characteristic of pre-adolescence and adolescence, at least in their West-Campus form. I even recognized some of those stages in my own recent past; indeed, Max's description of the present state of West-Campus studentdom reminded me uncomfortably of my behavior in the Lady-Creamhair period: capricious, at odds with itself, perverse, hard to live with. Its schisms, as manifested in the Quiet Riot, had been aggravated and rendered dangerous by the access of unwonted power--as when, in the space of a few semesters, a boy finds himself suddenly muscular, deep-voiced, aware of his failings, proud of his strengths, capable of truly potent love and hatred--and on his own. What hope there was that such an adolescent would reach maturity (not to say Commencement) without destroying himself was precisely the hope of the University.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“innocence is ignorance; ignorance is illusion; and Commencement, while it certainly is a metaphor, is no illusion. Commencement's for the disillusioned, not for the innocent.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

About the author

Popular quotes

“Unlike my mother, my father does not cry quietly. His wails roll out like a wave of pain, and I scramble to roll up my window. My mother cannot hear that. I cannot bear to hear it myself. I am not used to my father's crying. I've had no time to harden my heart against him.”
― Margaret Peterson Haddix, quote from Double Identity

“تطلعت حولى بعيدا عن موقع انهيار البرجين فى جراوند زيرو توجهت ببصرى الى شوارع نيويورك البعيدة عن موقع الانفجار والتى عادت الان الى حياتها الطبيعية تساءلت عما ان كان الناس الذين يسيرون فى هذه الشوارع يفكرون فى كل هذا ليس فقط فى تدمير البرجين لكن ايضا فى مزارع الرمان التى دمرت وفى الاربعة وعشرين الفا الذين يموتون جوعا كل يوم تساءلت اذا كانوا قد فكروا فى هذه الامور يوما ما واذا كان بوسعهم ان يصرفوا تفكيرهم بعيدا عن وظائفهم وسياراتهم النهمة للوقود ومكافآت اعمالهم ولو لفترة تكفى لان يتدبروا ماذا سيتركون للعالم الذى يعيشون فيه ويورثونه لاطفالهم .تساءلت ما الذى يعرفونه عنافغانستان ليست افغانستان التى يرونها على شاشة التلفزيون بل افغانستان المغطاة بثكنات الجيش الامريكى ودباباته افغانستان الرجل العجوز .تساءلت عما كان يفكر فيه اولئك الاربعة وعشرين الفا الذين يموتون كل يوم ثم رايت نفسى مرة اخرى اجلس امام جهاز كمبيوتر بشاشة مظلمة”
― John Perkins, quote from Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

“in kings people overlook and forgive behaviour they would not tolerate in others.”
― Raymond E. Feist, quote from A Darkness At Sethanon

“And Jaypaw-well, Jaypaw can heal cats."
"Thanks a bunch." muttered Jaypaw.”
― Erin Hunter, quote from Outcast

“Truth is a powerful weapon ... We must be careful how we use it." (Quote by Spottedleaf, page 5)”
― Erin Hunter, quote from Eclipse

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.