Observational Quotes

“A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?
I make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true.”
― Terry Pratchett

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

“It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
― Carl Sagan

“Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“Death came, Death went, but Commerce flowed Eternal.”
― Dean Koontz, Forever Odd

“Let me just say that I am not often lonely in country places. In cities I am, like the writers of the letters. Nature doesn't break your heart: other people do. Yet, we cannot live apart from each other in bowers feeding on nectar. We're in this together, this getting through our lives, as the fact that we are word-users shows.”
― Nuala O'Faolain

“She didn't use the misery of others to cultivate her own smugness, true, but at least I didn't go about eating all their food.”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

“Norway...looked to Roosevelt "as funny a kingdom as was ever imagined outside of opera bouffe....It is much as if Vermont should offhand try the experiment of having a king.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“It's not what you're not sure of that gets you: It's when you just know it's okay, and you don't check.”
― S.J. Lewis

“I think men get nervous when women start counting the number of female senators, and whites become edgy when they hear the next Supreme Court seat will probably go to a Latino. This isn't always because they object to sharing the spoils, by the way; it just reminds us that the melting pot may not be working, and we haven't yet achieved the ambiguous national dream of becoming a nation of indistinguishable beige atheists.”
― Dahlia Lithwick

“Maybe the secret to continued success is as simple as knowing that your past successes could be done so much better now.”
― Bill Loguidice

“Everywhere risk and defiance weave through the most mundane daily affairs.”
― Lucia Berlin, Where I Live Now: Stories 1993-1998

“Your magics cannot exist forever, the trick is to use them up wisely.”
― Hank Ferragudo

“I grew up in a country of over a billion people. The first uncomfortable question I asked my parents was not where children came from, but why were there so many of them.”
― Daksh Tyagi, A Nation of Idiots

“You are either a resident or an immigrant. Only, a resident is an immigrant further along in the transition.”
― Daksh Tyagi, Signs of Life

“Anyone or anything can be made famous. Technology has truly elevated the trivial. This is the true curse of our times.”
― Daksh Tyagi, Signs of Life

“Clementine stopped herself from rushing forward to stop him from toppling off the fence rail. Boys seemed to have their own magical powers when it came to posing about in precarious positions.”
― Sarah Jean Horwitz, The Dark Lord Clementine

“An obscure quote might have appealed to her, but Hildy would never get a tattoo. She was afraid of needles and, more importantly, permanence. She liked to think she was still at the pupa stage of existence.”
― Vicki Grant

“When all three parties were satisfied with the digestion of the medication, they left me alone to rest. To them, I may have seemed in stable condition, but in reality I perceived myself as an object, an inanimate object, a hollow revolving cylinder undergoing imminent changes due in-part to rising atmospheric pressure while hopped up on god knows what, fading to coma-like sleep and becoming more and more inaccessible to any further rational thinking.”
― Nick Voro, Conversational Therapy: Stories and Plays

“No, these individuals have had their fill. They depleted the resources of communication amongst themselves. It no longer offered excitation. They wanted a tryst, a midnight rendezvous, to be tongue-tied for an evening, not having to worry about puritanical appearances, acceptable behavior, placing place settings and feeding their children with cherubic faces. Trading paradisiacal palisades of their guarded community, the spiritless suburbia for subterranean devilry. These were philistines, not patrons of the arts. They merely wanted escapism. A stranger to fill their heads. A morally corrupt stand-up comic delivering the goods: immorality, immodesty, and obscenity. Food for thought, nutritive to their stale lives. Perhaps something they could even discuss behind locked doors, back in the privacy of their safe, secure homes.”
― Nick Voro, Conversational Therapy: Stories and Plays

“i like rooms lol”
― Theo Thimo, OMG THE DAY

“Armstrong was wrong. Before a giant leap, we must take one small step.”
― Daksh Tyagi, Signs of Life

“Villains rarely see themselves as villains. The burden of guilt is a hero’s disease.”
― Daksh Tyagi, Signs of Life

“A self-centered mindset often blinds one to the happiness of others.”
― Abhilipsa Mohanty

“Memories, like faintly etched images, serve as a gentle reminder that nothing is truly permanent; they whisper of a world destined to fade, leaving behind the traces of what once was.”
― Abhilipsa Mohanty

“Purposes are deducted from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer