#ten

I was in Nashville, Tennessee last year. After the show I went to a Waffle House. I'm not proud of it, I was hungry. And I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me: 'Hey, whatcha readin' for?' Isn't that the weirdest fuckin' question you've ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading FOR? Well, goddamnit, ya stumped me! Why do I read? Well . . . hmmm...I dunno...I guess I read for a lot of reasons and the main one is so I don't end up being a fuckin' waffle waitress. ↗

— Bill Hicks

#reading #tennessee #waffle #waffles #questions

Write what should not be forgotten. ↗

— Isabel Allende

#on-writing #writing #writing-advice #write

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. ↗

— Margaret Chittenden

#chittenden #crazy #margaret #room #writers

How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel! ↗

— Dodie Smith

#novel

Philosophy cannot be extinguished, though men will try ... The spirit seeks the light, that is its nature. It wishes to return to its origin, and must forever try to reach enlightenment. ↗

— Iain Pears

#human-spirit #philosophy #dreams

The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (“The Medusa”) ↗

— Thomas Ligotti

#horror #insight #sinister #terror #insight

Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#criticism #jane-austen #london

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs. ↗

— Hunter S. Thompson

#americans #existential #people #art

Marley was dead: to begin with. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#christmas

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#philosophy #first-sentence