Mark Oliver Everett · 256 pages
Rating: (4.8K votes)
“Life is so full of unpredictable beauty and strange surprises. Sometimes that beauty is too much for me to handle. Do you know that feeling? When something is just too beautiful? When someone says something or writes something or plays something that moves you to the point of tears, maybe even changes you.”
― Mark Oliver Everett, quote from Things The Grandchildren Should Know
“Maybe I don't like people as much as the rest of the world seems to...But occasionally, people will pleasantly surprise me and I'll fall in love with them, so go figure.”
― Mark Oliver Everett, quote from Things The Grandchildren Should Know
“Kids know what's going on. They always respond to The Beatles, for instance. Doesn't matter when they were born, they always seem to respond. Show me a kid who innately doesn't like The Beatles, and I'll show you a bad seed.”
― Mark Oliver Everett, quote from Things The Grandchildren Should Know
“Maybe I don't like people as much as the rest of the world seems to. Seems like the human race is in love with itself. What kind of ego do you have to have to think that you were created in God's image? I mean, to invent the idea that God must be like us. Please. As Stanley Kubrick once pointed out, the discovery of more intelligent life somewhere other than Earth would be catastrophic to man, simply because we would no longer be able to think of ourselves as the centre of the universe. I guess I'm slowly becoming one of those crusty old cranks that thinks animals are better than people. But, occasionally, people will pleasantly surprise me and I'll fall in love with one of them, so go figure.”
― Mark Oliver Everett, quote from Things The Grandchildren Should Know
“Thanks to my ridiculous, sometimes tragic, and always unsteady upbringing, I was given the gift of bone-crushing insecurity. One thing you’ll notice about people with mental problems is constant self-absorbation. I think that’s because it’s such a struggle just to be who they are, so they have a hard time getting past it.”
― Mark Oliver Everett, quote from Things The Grandchildren Should Know
“I was born the son of a humble mechanic. A quantum mechanic.”
― Mark Oliver Everett, quote from Things The Grandchildren Should Know
“Sure, I'm a weirdo in some ways. I don't like going to parties and show, I hide in my house a lot. But, all things considered, it could be a lot worse. And I'm able to get myself to this show, at least. I become aware of a feeling that has been slowly creeping in under my skin for a few years, but now has become more tangible. I'd been through a lot - I'm OK. And if I want to be, I'm better than OK. I'm certainly not the most well-adjusted person on earth, but considering everything ... I mean - I survived. And I survived just by being me. How lucky and amazing is that?”
― Mark Oliver Everett, quote from Things The Grandchildren Should Know
“We're all fucked up, I'm thinking, and that's the truth. Everyone's got some crazy shit going on in their life and no one is living any of that fairy-tale shit that the TV made you believe life was supposed to be like when you were young”
― Mark Oliver Everett, quote from Things The Grandchildren Should Know
“I think about how angry I was that my dad didn't take better care of himself. How he never went to the doctor, let himself become grossly overweight, smoked three packs a day, drank like a fish and never exercised. But then I think about how his colleague mentioned that, days before dying, my dad had said that he had lived a good life and that he was satisfied. I realize that there is a certain value in my father's way of life. He ate, smoked and drank as he pleased, and one day he just suddenly and quickly died. Given some of the other choices I'd witnessed, it turns out that enjoying yourself and then dying quickly is not such a bad way to go.”
― Mark Oliver Everett, quote from Things The Grandchildren Should Know
Mark Oliver Everett
Born place: in The United States
Born date April 10, 1963
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“We are all in such a hurry, we want everything at once. We believe that all truth can be stated in a few minutes. The answer to that is that it cannot.”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure
“Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.”
― Jamaica Kincaid, quote from Annie John
“I am writing this book because we're all going to die - In the loneliness of my own life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother faraway, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our deaths, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my broke heart in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Visions of Cody
“Death is the only limit to the road you travel.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from The Hand of Oberon
“Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for “basic skills” practice is a smoke screen”
― John Taylor Gatto, quote from Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education
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