TagsTagsIt is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as ...
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — George Bernard Shaw
I couldn’t think. I couldn’t remember. I was wound up like a spring and ready to bust. All I could see was the dead guy in the middle of the room and my gun. My gun! Somebody grabbed at my arm and hauled me upright and the questions started again. ...
I seem to see only the strivings of an ape reft of his tail, and grown rusty at climbing, who has reeled blunderingly from mystery to mystery, with pathetic makeshifts, not understanding anything, greedy in all desires, and always honeycombed with poltroonery. — James Branch Cabell
It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter ...
The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter. — Sam Spade
When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills ...
Understand this, I mean to arrive at the truth. The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it. — Hercule Poirot
Myth is the nothing that is all. — Fernando Pessoa
It was one of those nights when the sky came down and wrapped itself around the world. The rain clawed at the windows of the bar like an angry cat and tried to sneak in every time some drunk lurched in the door. The place reeked of stale beer and ...
An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing. — Ross Macdonald
“I hate to say this,” said my attorney as we sat down at the Merry-Go-Round Bar on the second balcony, “but this place is getting to me. I think I’m getting the Fear.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Men substitute words for reality and then argue about the words. — Edwin Howard Armstrong
Every ten years a man should give himself a good kick in the pants. — Edward Steichen
It’s a trick. Get an axe. — Ash, Army of Darkness
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. — Ursula K. LeGuin
You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. — Ken Kesey
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little ...
I will not teach a man who is not anxious to learn, and will not explain to one who is not trying to make things clear to himself. — Confucius
Mud! Mud! Glorious mud! Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. So, follow me, follow, down to the hollow, And there let us wallow in glorious mud. — Michael Flanders, The Hippopotamus Song
Why should things be easy to understand? — Thomas Pynchon
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind. — Albert Einstein
There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery. — Enrico Fermi
Keep a thing happenin’ all throughout. — John Coltrane
A harmonious design requires that nothing be added or taken away. — Vitruvius