You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
‘Listen. Easy now,’ said the old man gently. ‘I know, I know. You’re afraid of making mistakes. Don’t be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people’s faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.’
— Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Well, maybe it is true,” Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. “Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?”
“I do,” Dunbar told him.
“Why?” Clevinger asked.
“What else is there?
— Catch 22, Joseph Heller
This is a marketing holocaust. Twenty four hours a day, for the rest of our lives, the powers that be are hard at work dumbing us to death. So, to defend ourselves, and fight against assimilating this dullness into our thought processes, we must learn to read. To stimulate our own imagination. To cultivate our own consciousness. Our own belief systems. We all need these skills to defend, to preserve, our own minds.
— Detachment, 2011
Love is our response to our highest values—and can be nothing else.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
It remained for our century to redefine the purpose of philosophy. The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there isn’t any.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being…Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
…It is from this fact that one may understand why dreams often express themselves as analogies, why one dream image slides into another, and why neither the logic nor the time scale of our waking life seems to apply. The form that dreams take is natural to the unconscious because the material from which they are produced is retained in the subliminal state in precisely this fashion. Dreams do not guard sleep from what Freud called the “incompatible wish.” What he called “disguise” is actually the shape all impulses naturally take in the unconsious. Thus, a dream cannot produce a definite thought. If it begins to do so, it ceases to be a dream because it crosses the threshold of consciousness. That is why dreams seem to skip the very points that are most important to the conscious mind, and seem rather to manifest the “fringe of consciousness,” like the faint gleam of stars during a total eclipse of the sun.
— Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
![The Stephen King bookshelf in my living room :]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxpbcjUxbO1qa5w3qo1_250.jpg)
I was just thinking about how stupid some people can be—you put them in a room with six doors, they’ll still walk into the walls. And then have the nerve to bitch about it.
— Stephen King, The Wastelands
When the pain is this bad everything is in another world, pain makes a shadow of substance and a mockery even of love.
— Stephen King, Dreamcatcher
