Not to mention antinouns.
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"The Historia Augusta is a very interesting book. Unlike most Roman histories, it's dense with primary sources: extracts from letters, speeches, pronouncements. It’s also packed with quotes and references from other histories, some of which are unattested in any other source. The only problem is that it seems to have been written as a piece of vicious revenge against all future historians. A few of its emperors are described issuing decrees or holding councils on dates when we know they were otherwise occupied being dead. Other people described in the Historia Augusta never existed at all. Neither did the other books describing them, or the historians who supposedly wrote those books. It points to whole libraries of unreal texts. Like a book that fell into our world from a parallel universe. Also, the six authors all write in exactly the same style, and their Latin is the Latin of at least a century after they were supposed to have been writing. (Imagine a Victorian novel in which characters all greet each other with ‘wassup.’) It’s all a big prank. But annoyingly, some of the material in the Historia Augusta is accurate. It’s just that when there are no other corroborations, we can’t know which parts. Whoever actually wrote it is a personal hero of mine."
- Sam Kriss
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"Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors [...] We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others."
- C.S. Lewis
"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them, well, I have others."
- Groucho Marx
"Look, I'm all about loyalty. In fact, I feel like part of what I'm being paid for here is my loyalty. But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly, I'm going wherever they value loyalty the most."
- Dwight Schrute
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"It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones [...] Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity."
- Umberto Eco
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Stolen from a stranger on the internet:
"It was a hot night in the City of Angels when a leggy blonde walked into my office. She had 13, maybe 14 legs. Way too many. "That's a lot of legs for a dame," I suggested to her eldritch form. She glanced my way, and rolled her eyes at me. I picked them up and rolled them back."
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"The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
- Thucydides
"For several centuries now, people have defended new things by pointing out how uniformly people have rejected new things. But sometimes a new gadget is not actually good. Maybe radium toothpaste is not just the fast way to a winning smile."
- Sam Kriss
"[T]he fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
- Carl Sagan
"Dostoevsky is a great writer, but maybe not a good one. His books sag with blather: page after page of drunks rambling, matrons shrieking, people turning purple. And then he’ll very lightly season this overwrought, hysterical Victorian nonsense with some of the most devastating moral observations ever put to the page."
- Sam Kriss
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Stolen from a stranger on the internet:
"It was a hot night in the City of Angels when a leggy blonde walked into my office. She had 13, maybe 14 legs. Way too many. "That's a lot of legs for a dame," I suggested to her eldritch form. She glanced my way, and rolled her eyes at me. I picked them up and rolled them back."
I would watch the hell out of that movie.
