Modern life is often a mechanical oppression, and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
—Ernest Hemingway, 1935
Archive
Quotes
To call a fashion wearable is the kiss of death. No new fashion worth its salt is ever wearable.
—Eugenia Sheppard, 1960I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.
—James Thurber, 1955Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
—Herman Melville, 1851The mind is led on, step by step, to defeat its own logic.
—Dai Vernon, 1994The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.
—Donald Barthelme, 1964We never are definitely right; we can only be sure we are wrong.
—Richard P. Feynman, 1965I quit life as from an inn, not as from a home.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 44 BCThe affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774Even a paranoid can have enemies.
—Henry Kissinger, 1977Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851The land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence.
—The BibleTechnology is so much fun, but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
—Daniel Boorstin, 1978