“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
~ Isaac Asimov, b. 2 Jan 1920
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Isaac Asimov (b. January 2nd): “Science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
2 JanCuba Gooding Jr. (b. Jan 02): “My mom says don’t open the door to the devil…”
2 Jan
“Don’t let people disrespect you. My mom says don’t open the door to the devil. Surround yourself with positive people.”
~ Cuba Gooding Jr, b. 2 January 1968
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J. Edgar Hoover (b. Jan 1st): “We are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy…”
1 Jan
“I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.”
~ J. Edgar Hoover, b. 1 January 1895
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Bo Diddley (b. December 30): “I opened the door for a lot of people…”
30 Dec
“I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob.”
~ Bo Diddley, b. 30 December 1928
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Marianne Faithfull (b. December 29): “Sometimes you just have to get a shock to grow up and wake up…”
29 Dec
“Sometimes you just have to get a shock to grow up and wake up, and I’ve had lots of shocks because it’s as though I don’t learn the lessons, so something new comes and hits me.”
~ Marianne Faithfull, b. 29 December 1946
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Eddie Vedder (b. December 23): “The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself.”
23 Dec
“The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself.”
~ Eddie Vedder, b. 23 December 1964
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Ralph Fiennes (b. December 22): “As an actor, there’s a bit of you that wants to be looked at…”
22 Dec
“As an actor, there’s a bit of you that’s decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there’s a paradoxical bit that wants to run away.”
~ Ralph Fiennes, b. 22 December 1962
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Andrew Carnegie (b. November 25): “I resolved to stop accumulating…”
25 Nov
“I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.”
~ Andrew Carnegie, b. 25 November 1835
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Shelby Foote (b. November 17): “Longevity conquers scandal every time.”
17 Nov
Shelby Foote (born 17 November 1916, died 27 June 2005) was an American historian and novelist who wrote The Civil War: A Narrative, a massive, three-volume history of the war.
Seven Quotes
- Longevity conquers scandal every time.
- Most of my inspiration, if that’s the word, came from books themselves.
- I can’t begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.
- Getting close to books, and spending time by myself, I was obliged to think about things I would never have thought about if I was busy romping around with a brother and sister.
- If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That’s how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.
- I think that everything you do helps you to write if you’re a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don’t experience either one of those, you’re being deprived of something.
- The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.
Chinua Achebe (b. November 16): “My weapon is literature.”
16 Nov
Chinua Achebe (born 16 November 1930, died 21 March 2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. He was best known for his first novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart, which sold more than 8 million copies around the world, and was translated into 50 languages. Achebe was the most translated African writer of all time. Nelson Mandela referred to Achebe as a writer ‘in whose company the prison walls fell down’. The recipient of more than 30 honorary degrees, he was awarded the Man Booker International Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, an Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Nigerian National Order of Merit.
Quotes on writing:
- My weapon is literature.
- If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.
- Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control.
- If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.
- The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.
- To me, being an intellectual doesn’t mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
- Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am – and what I need – is something I have to find out myself.
- The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor’s domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes.
- Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey through the world.
- It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.
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