Rob Sheffield

It’s the same with people who say, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ Even people who say this must realize that the exact opposite is true. What doesn’t kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you incredibly annoying.

When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.

The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.

Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.

I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

I get sentimental over the music of the ’90s. Deplorable, really. But I love it all. As far as I’m concerned the ’90s was the best era for music ever, even the stuff that I loathed at the time, even the stuff that gave me stomach cramps.

Nothing connects to the moment like music. I count the music to bring me back, or more precisely, to bring her forward.

Alan Bennett

What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.

How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another.

One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.

Slavoj Žižek

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.

The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other.

Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: "Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!

The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.

The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save the victims, but also - even more, perhaps - the ruthless dedication to annihilating those who made them victims.

Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.

Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.

Thomas Pynchon II

Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.

Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

They're in love. Fuck the war.

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

Why should things be easy to understand?

It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

Keep cool but care.

The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.

John Donne II

Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.

I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so.

And who understands? Not me, because if I did I would forgive it all.

More than kisses, letters mingle souls.

To know and feel all this and not have the words to express it makes a human a grave of his own thoughts

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

Then love is sin, and let me sinful be.

Richard Lederer

There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.

Let’s face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren’t invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren’t sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm goes off by going on. English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race (which, of course, isn’t a race at all). That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.

Fritjof Capra

Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated "building blocks," but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitute the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object's interaction with the observer.

Subatomic particles do not exist but rather show 'tendencies to exist', and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show 'tendencies to occur'.

If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago. ... This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism.

Genuine mental health would involve a balanced interplay of both modes of experience, a way of life in which one's identification with the ego is playful and tentative rather than absolute and mandatory, while the concern with material possessions is pragmatic rather than obsessive.

In the words of Heisenberg, “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."

Katherine Mansfield

The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

The mind I love must have wild places.

Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others ... Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.

Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can't build on it; it's only good for wallowing in.

The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.

What I feel for you can’t be conveyed in phrasal combinations; It either screams out loud or stays painfully silent but I promise — it beats words. It beats worlds.

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship, was that one had to explain nothing.

I adore Life. What do all the fools matter and all the stupidity. They do matter but somehow for me they cannot touch the body of Life. Life is marvellous. I want to be deeply rooted in it - to live - to expand - to breathe in it - to rejoice - to share it. To give and to be asked for Love.

Hajime Isayama

The only thing we're allowed to believe is that we won't regret the choice we made.

On that day, mankind received a grim reminder. We lived in fear of the Titans and were disgraced to live in these cages we called walls.

If I can't do it. . . I'll just die.
But if I win, I live.
If I don't fight, I can't win.

The world is merciless, and it's also very beautiful.

You can't change anything unless you can discard part of yourself too. To surpass monsters, you must be willing to abandon your humanity .

When we're born. . . All of us. . . Are free. People who reject that, no matter how strong they are. . . Don't matter.

We're going to explore the outside world someday, right? Far beyond these walls, there's flaming water, land made of ice, and fields of sand spread wide. It's the world my parents wanted to go to.

The difference in judgement between you and me originates from different rules derived from past experience.

Someone who cannot abandon everything cannot achieve anything.

Howard Zinn

TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

I'm worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they're doing. I'm concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that's handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.

How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?

Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.

History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.

We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

I wonder how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own.