Collected Quotes (Everyone's got 'em)

As I prepare my next blog, here's a sampling of some quotes that I've collected over the years.

"Boredom, I think, protects the individual, makes tolerable for him the impossible experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be."
- Adam Philips "On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored"

"The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents."
- H.P. Lovecraft

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
- Anton Chekhov

"That trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills. My characters are galley slaves."
- Vladimir Nabokov

"Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music."
- George Carlin

"The best minds of my generation can't make bail..."
- Ani Difranco

"What is man but an ingenious machine for turning red wine into urine?"
- Isak Dineson

"There is nothing new in the world except the history you do no know."
- Harry Truman

"Whenever I'm asked what kind of writing is the most lucrative, I have to say ransom notes."
- Literary agent H.N. Swanson

"Difficile est saturam non scribere (It is difficult not to write satire)."
- Juvenal

"Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings."
- Heinrich Heine "Almansor: A Tragedy"

"The purpose of a story... is not to fulfill some crazy formalistic Aristotelian rule, but to get the fucking reader to read the fucking book."
- Erica Jong, quoted in "Interviews with Contemporary Novelists" by Diana Cooper Clark

"I have no time for lies or fantasy and neither should you. Enjoy or die."
- Johnny Rotten

"We can pray over the cholera victim or we can give her 500 mg of tetracycline every 12 hr."
- Carl Sagan

"'Rehearse death.' To say this is to tell a person to rehearse his freedom. A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. He is above, or at any rate beyond the reach of, all political powers."
- Seneca, "Letter XXVI"

"Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away."
- Philip K. Dick

"Io rido, e il rider mio non passa dentro:
Io ardo, e l'arsion mia non par di fore.
(I laugh, and my laughter is not within me:
I burn, and the burning is not seen outside)."
- Niccolo Machiavelli

"Music and singing do not produce in the heart that which is not in it."
- Abu Sulaiman al-Davani

"Everyone thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself."
- Leo Tolstoy