Isabelle Eberhardt

Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all.

A nomad I will remain for life, 
in love with distant and uncharted places.

A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is a deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out.

Crime, particularly among the poor and downtrodden, is often a last gesture of liberty.

We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.

Mark Manson

In my life, I have given a fuck about many people and many things. I have also not given a fuck about many people and many things. And like the road not taken, it was the fucks not given that made all the difference.

Don't hope for a life without problems," the panda said. "There's no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.

You can’t build a better mind without challenging your own beliefs and assumptions.

The person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. The dream job you take is the job you stress over. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice—whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What we gain is also what we lose. What creates our positive experiences will define our negative experiences.

Acts of love are valid only if they're performed without conditions or expectations.

Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you're going to start crying at inappropriate time.

Colson Whitehead

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me.

Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.

Amor Towles

In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.

It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book.

. . . be careful when choosing what you're proud of--because the world has every intention of using it against you.

As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion....if the next thing you're going to say makes you feel better, then it's probably the wrong thing to say. This is one of the finer maxims that I've discovered in life. And you can have it, since it's been of no use to me.

That's the problem with living in New York. You've got no New York to run away to.

Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee. Only decades later would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice.

Alexandra Adornetto

A man in love can do extraordinary things, I don’t care if you’re an angel, you’re my angel, and I won’t let you go.

I thought you were gone forever, I thought you’d walked away from everything, because I failed, because I destroyed the only thing that ever mattered to me. I waited for you to come, but you didn’t.

That was one of the saddest things about people--their most important thoughts and feelings often went unspoken and barely understood.

Sometimes it's better to stop trying to make sense of things. Life isn't clear cut, there are always gray areas.

Sometimes it's the little things that count most.

To make one person the center of your world is bound to end in disaster. There are too many factors outside your control.

Some say we can't choose who we fall in love with; love chooses us. Sometimes people fall for the complete antithesis of everything they believe they're looking for

I prayed for all his dreams to come true. I prayed that I would always be able to connect with him--even if I was no longer on earth.

Miranda July

All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.

Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you.What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.

What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.

I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.

Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed.

Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it's worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.

Homer Hickam

I had discovered that learning something, no matter how complex, wasn't hard when I had a reason to want to know it.

Not much comes easy in this world, Sonny. If it does, it's best to be suspicious of it. It's probably not worth much.

All I’ve done is give you a book,” she said. “You have to have the courage to learn what’s inside it."

I would tell people some years later that I was raised an only child and so was my brother.

There are two things every woman really wants: one, she wants to know that a man really loves her, and two, that he isn't going to stop.

You must completely dedicate yourselves to it. To do less will be to let down your country, your state, your parents, your teachers, and ultimately, yourselves. Remember this: The only good citizen is the well-educated citizen.

Azar Nafisi

You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.”

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.

It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.

Harvey Pekar

Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.

It makes you feel good to know that there's other people afflicted like you. 

Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.

I think comics have far more potential than a lot of people realize. 

There was a survey done a few years ago that affected me greatly. It was discovered that intelligent people either estimate their intelligence accurately or slightly underestimate themselves, but stupid people overestimate their intelligence and by huge margins. (And these were things like straight up math tests, not controversial IQ tests.)

I'm as big as snob as they come, but money is a terrible barometer of a person's worth. The standard I used is what a person is choosing to do with his life. So for me a struggling musician (someone dedicated to their craft, not some slacker) is much better than some lame investment banker.