Steven Brust: “A masterful storyteller of contagious glee and self-deprecating badassery” —Skyler White
Quotables
[quotcoll]
52 thoughts on “Quotables”
xcellence is… Caring more than others think wise. Risking more than others think safe. Dreaming more than others think practical. Expecting more than others think possible – Tulsa Boy Scouts
Problems are solved in pieces. If you are on the 7th floor of a burning building you can either die or jump out a window. Once you are out the window you are alive for another 2 seconds, during which time you figure out the solution to the next problem and so on..if you are falling off a building you might as well try to fly as you’ve got nothing to lose. – Babylon 5
Virgin birth, water into wine; it’s like Harry Potter, but it causes Genocide and bad folk music -American Dad
“Every decision you have made..has been right. Every decision I have made..has been wrong. But there is one thing: I have never lied about who I was, what I was doing, or why I was doing it..” – Satan
“To arms, To arms!… Two legs, Two legs baby.” -Stonekeep
“And, isn’t sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you’re good and crazy, oooh, oooh, oooh, the sky is the limit. ” -The Tick
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. -Will Rogers
I’m high alright, but not on false drugs!
I’m high on the real thing; powerful gasoline, a clean windshield and a shoeshine. -Pastor Rod Flash
Excuse me, not excuse me. You’re making, not making the doctor very unhappy, happy. -Doctor Memory
The great way is not difficult for those with no preferences. -Third Zen Patriarch
Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt. The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis. For in the last analysis all tyranny rests on fraud, on getting someone to accept false assumptions, and any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.
Bergen Evans
A Tale of a Tub, 1946.
“I’d do anything to have a body like that guy. Anything, except diet and exercise.” -Steve Martin
“Very well, I agree with the need for an axe.”
– Tazendra
“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
— C.S. Lewis
(At least, I think that’s who said it.)
“Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.”
—Roger Zelazny, Yama to Tak
“Do you mean oil?”
“No! I mean black blood of the earth.”
Egg to Jack Burton
Big Trouble in Little China
“Doors, doors, doors”
Roger Zelazny
*Nine Princes in Amber*
“Mother, should I trust the government?” – Pink Floyd, Mother
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”
Carl Sagan, 1980
Outside of a dog , a book is a man’s best friend . Inside a dog it’s too dark to read . Groucho Marx
“Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”
—J. R. R. Tolkien
First appearing in *The Fellowship of the Ring*, Book I, Chapter 3, then invoked as a familiar adage throughout the rest of *The Lord of the Rings*.
(*Snap*—and thank-you, Jim Butcher; that’s 11+ down, 5+ to go.)
“No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will cramp his style.”
–Steven Brust, (Pretty certain from the Novel Taltos, but may have been Jhereg, Yendi, or Teckla)
(Addendum: unless he’s undead, but that would be spoiling…)
“I once saw a forklift lift a crate of forks. It was way too literal for me.” -Mitch Hedberg.
re “No matter how subtle the wizard….” @17:
—S. K. Z. Brust
First appearing in *Taltos* as Chapter 17 header, then invoked as a familiar adage throughout the rest of the *Taltos* series.
Crap, screwed up again. @ 19 should have said:
First appearing in *Jhereg* as Chapter 17 header, then invoked as a familiar adage throughout the rest of the *Taltos* series.
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy, and good with ketchup.
(No idea who originated that particular spoof.)
The first priest was the first scoundrel to meet the first fool.
Voltaire, Rousseau, or my history teacher
“Never date a girl whose brothers have knife scars.” – Slovotsky’s law #17
Joel Rosenberg, The Sleeping Dragon
“Moreover our memory is like a sieve, the holes of which in time get larger and larger: the older we get, the quicker anything entrusted to it slips from the memory, whereas, what was fixed fast in it in early days is there still.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer; “Psychological Observations”
Or, to put it in Vlad’s Notes form:
“Memory is like a Whatchacallit.”
– Steven Brust; Chapter 1 header for *Dragon*
(His *other* 17-part Cite the Source challenge to readers. Still struggling to get a firm handle on it. Not much liking the fingerholds I’ve snagged so far.)
knob_e@24: Possibly via Pratchett:
Chapter ??? of Pratchett’s FaustXXXXXEric is titled, “Memory Is Like a Wossname”.
Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
-Diderot
“You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think!”
– Dorothy Parker
That quote by Satan is interesting….curious where it comes from.
@ Shoelace
“To Reign in Hell” by our favorite author.
“…He would be an ideal judge. He has the kind of daring mind that glorifies in deciding an issue without understanding it.”
Rex Stout
“Nothing succeeds like a budgie”
– Anonymously scribbled in a UK public toilet
“Oh…I’m going to the special hell…”
– Malcom Reynolds
“The core problem with the New Left was that it wasn’t an ideology, it was a mood–and if you are susceptible to one mood, you are susceptible to another.” — Dave Van Ronk
Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future. -Ayn Rand
“The problem with quotes found on the internet is you have no way of confirming their authenticity.” – Abraham Lincoln
Malcom Reynolds-” Looks like we got here just in time, what does that make us?”
Zoe- ” Big Damn Heroes Sir!”
Malcom Reynolds- ” Ain’t we just.”
Firefly Episode Titled : Safe
” Two dead Teckla under your pillow” – Loish
Kate: “What was Sherlock Holnes’ priciple? ‘Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'”
Dirk: I reject that entirely. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks…. The first idea merely suppose something we don’t know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The second, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therfore be suspicious of it, and all it’s specious rationality.”
Douglas Adams, “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”
@skzb Alas. Hoist by my own petard. Or something.
The only thing worse than looking for authentic quotes on the internet is incorrectly attributing authentic quotes on the internet .–Oscar Wilde
I must make a point of telling Sethra not to underrate the power of the hissy-cow. – Vlad
John Savage facing off against Controller Mustapha Mond on the subject of compulsory monthly Violent Passion Surrogate treatments as part of a state-provided health care plan:
[Mond] “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
– Aldous Huxley, *Brave New World*
“You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way.”
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
“I’d rather hate myself for failing, than hate my life for never having tried.” – All That Remains
“Success leads to stagnation. Stagnation leads to failure.” – Vlad Taltos
“Do not let one’s tongue outrun one’s sense.” – Chilon
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big joke on me…Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.
-Robert Frost
When your belief runs headfirst into an opposing fact, you have but two choices: change your belief or run for office.-Doc Blalock
The Impossible attracts me, because everything possible has been done & the world didn’t change.
-Sun Ra
“You can lead a force to slaughter but you cannot make them think.”
“Everybody I know who’s right, always agrees with me.” -Principia Discordia
No one yet has learned to drive a locomotive sitting in his study.
L. D. Trockij
I suggested that my oldest daughter read _Atlas Shrugged_ because I wanted her to get a solid inoculation to those ideas. She was not very enthusiastic.
After awhile, she asked me, “Daddy, isn’t this just Twilight with rich people in place of vampires?”
“Don’t drink and park; accidents cause people.” –Marge Vaidik (my mom)
xcellence is… Caring more than others think wise. Risking more than others think safe. Dreaming more than others think practical. Expecting more than others think possible – Tulsa Boy Scouts
Problems are solved in pieces. If you are on the 7th floor of a burning building you can either die or jump out a window. Once you are out the window you are alive for another 2 seconds, during which time you figure out the solution to the next problem and so on..if you are falling off a building you might as well try to fly as you’ve got nothing to lose. – Babylon 5
Virgin birth, water into wine; it’s like Harry Potter, but it causes Genocide and bad folk music -American Dad
“Every decision you have made..has been right. Every decision I have made..has been wrong. But there is one thing: I have never lied about who I was, what I was doing, or why I was doing it..” – Satan
“To arms, To arms!… Two legs, Two legs baby.” -Stonekeep
“And, isn’t sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you’re good and crazy, oooh, oooh, oooh, the sky is the limit. ” -The Tick
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. -Will Rogers
I’m high alright, but not on false drugs!
I’m high on the real thing; powerful gasoline, a clean windshield and a shoeshine. -Pastor Rod Flash
Excuse me, not excuse me. You’re making, not making the doctor very unhappy, happy. -Doctor Memory
The great way is not difficult for those with no preferences. -Third Zen Patriarch
Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt. The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis. For in the last analysis all tyranny rests on fraud, on getting someone to accept false assumptions, and any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.
Bergen Evans
A Tale of a Tub, 1946.
“I’d do anything to have a body like that guy. Anything, except diet and exercise.” -Steve Martin
“Very well, I agree with the need for an axe.”
– Tazendra
“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
— C.S. Lewis
(At least, I think that’s who said it.)
“Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.”
—Roger Zelazny, Yama to Tak
“Do you mean oil?”
“No! I mean black blood of the earth.”
Egg to Jack Burton
Big Trouble in Little China
“Doors, doors, doors”
Roger Zelazny
*Nine Princes in Amber*
“Mother, should I trust the government?” – Pink Floyd, Mother
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”
Carl Sagan, 1980
Outside of a dog , a book is a man’s best friend . Inside a dog it’s too dark to read . Groucho Marx
“Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”
—J. R. R. Tolkien
First appearing in *The Fellowship of the Ring*, Book I, Chapter 3, then invoked as a familiar adage throughout the rest of *The Lord of the Rings*.
(*Snap*—and thank-you, Jim Butcher; that’s 11+ down, 5+ to go.)
“No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will cramp his style.”
–Steven Brust, (Pretty certain from the Novel Taltos, but may have been Jhereg, Yendi, or Teckla)
(Addendum: unless he’s undead, but that would be spoiling…)
“I once saw a forklift lift a crate of forks. It was way too literal for me.” -Mitch Hedberg.
re “No matter how subtle the wizard….” @17:
—S. K. Z. Brust
First appearing in *Taltos* as Chapter 17 header, then invoked as a familiar adage throughout the rest of the *Taltos* series.
Crap, screwed up again. @ 19 should have said:
First appearing in *Jhereg* as Chapter 17 header, then invoked as a familiar adage throughout the rest of the *Taltos* series.
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy, and good with ketchup.
(No idea who originated that particular spoof.)
The first priest was the first scoundrel to meet the first fool.
Voltaire, Rousseau, or my history teacher
“Never date a girl whose brothers have knife scars.” – Slovotsky’s law #17
Joel Rosenberg, The Sleeping Dragon
“Moreover our memory is like a sieve, the holes of which in time get larger and larger: the older we get, the quicker anything entrusted to it slips from the memory, whereas, what was fixed fast in it in early days is there still.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer; “Psychological Observations”
Or, to put it in Vlad’s Notes form:
“Memory is like a Whatchacallit.”
– Steven Brust; Chapter 1 header for *Dragon*
(His *other* 17-part Cite the Source challenge to readers. Still struggling to get a firm handle on it. Not much liking the fingerholds I’ve snagged so far.)
knob_e@24: Possibly via Pratchett:
Chapter ??? of Pratchett’s FaustXXXXXEric is titled, “Memory Is Like a Wossname”.
http://cracksandshards.com/jokes.html#Pratchett
Mark A. Mandel, proprietor, Cracks and Shards
http://www.cracksandshards.com
a Steven Brust fan website
Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
-Diderot
“You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think!”
– Dorothy Parker
That quote by Satan is interesting….curious where it comes from.
@ Shoelace
“To Reign in Hell” by our favorite author.
“…He would be an ideal judge. He has the kind of daring mind that glorifies in deciding an issue without understanding it.”
Rex Stout
“Nothing succeeds like a budgie”
– Anonymously scribbled in a UK public toilet
“Oh…I’m going to the special hell…”
– Malcom Reynolds
“The core problem with the New Left was that it wasn’t an ideology, it was a mood–and if you are susceptible to one mood, you are susceptible to another.” — Dave Van Ronk
Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future. -Ayn Rand
“The problem with quotes found on the internet is you have no way of confirming their authenticity.” – Abraham Lincoln
Fair enough, Here is the source for my quote:
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/middle_class.html#order_1
I love that one, Dennis. Only it was Twain.
Malcom Reynolds-” Looks like we got here just in time, what does that make us?”
Zoe- ” Big Damn Heroes Sir!”
Malcom Reynolds- ” Ain’t we just.”
Firefly Episode Titled : Safe
” Two dead Teckla under your pillow” – Loish
Kate: “What was Sherlock Holnes’ priciple? ‘Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'”
Dirk: I reject that entirely. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks…. The first idea merely suppose something we don’t know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The second, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therfore be suspicious of it, and all it’s specious rationality.”
Douglas Adams, “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”
@skzb Alas. Hoist by my own petard. Or something.
The only thing worse than looking for authentic quotes on the internet is incorrectly attributing authentic quotes on the internet .–Oscar Wilde
I must make a point of telling Sethra not to underrate the power of the hissy-cow. – Vlad
John Savage facing off against Controller Mustapha Mond on the subject of compulsory monthly Violent Passion Surrogate treatments as part of a state-provided health care plan:
[Mond] “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
– Aldous Huxley, *Brave New World*
“You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way.”
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
“I’d rather hate myself for failing, than hate my life for never having tried.” – All That Remains
“Success leads to stagnation. Stagnation leads to failure.” – Vlad Taltos
“Do not let one’s tongue outrun one’s sense.” – Chilon
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big joke on me…Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.
-Robert Frost
When your belief runs headfirst into an opposing fact, you have but two choices: change your belief or run for office.-Doc Blalock
The Impossible attracts me, because everything possible has been done & the world didn’t change.
-Sun Ra
“You can lead a force to slaughter but you cannot make them think.”
“Everybody I know who’s right, always agrees with me.” -Principia Discordia
No one yet has learned to drive a locomotive sitting in his study.
L. D. Trockij
I suggested that my oldest daughter read _Atlas Shrugged_ because I wanted her to get a solid inoculation to those ideas. She was not very enthusiastic.
After awhile, she asked me, “Daddy, isn’t this just Twilight with rich people in place of vampires?”
“Don’t drink and park; accidents cause people.” –Marge Vaidik (my mom)