Words to Live By

by Eve Fisher

I don't believe in New Year's resolutions, because I can think of no finer way to make sure you disappoint yourselves and others than to announce how this year you are going to make yourself perfect.  "No, really, this time it's going to work!"  Yeah, and I am going to take up brain surgery as a hobby.  Besides, I saw the Peloton commercial, and I agree - it was horrible.

But I do believe in sharing the wisdom of the ages so that we can all mull things over together.  These quotes come from a variety of authors, articles, etc., and I hope you enjoy them.

William Gibson,
Wikipedia Link

"In writing “The Peripheral,” [William Gibson had] been able to bring himself to believe in the reality of an ongoing slow-motion apocalypse called “the jackpot.” A character describes the jackpot as “multi-causal”—“more a climate than an event.” The world eases into it gradually, as all the bad things we worry about—rising oceans, crop failures, drug-resistant diseases, resource wars, and so on—happen, here and there, to varying degrees, over the better part of the twenty-first century, adding up to “androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit” that eventually kills eighty per cent of the human race. It’s a Gibsonian apocalypse: the end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed."

NOTE:  Sounds right on the money to me.  The only thing I'd add to it is the one-word sentence, "Yet." - (Link)

"Accept in your mind that anything which can happen, can happen to you."
- Pythagoras

"Everything I've ever said will be credited to Dorothy Parker."
- George S. Kaufman, as quoted in George S. Kaufman and His Friends (1974) by Scott Meredith

"Unhappiness can be classified under five main heads — no more, I assure you. Once you know the cause of a malady, the remedy should not be impossible."
- Mr. Parker Pyne, "Parker Pyne Investigates"

"A desire to have all the fun is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry."
- Lord Peter Wimsey, "Gaudy Night"

"If there is anything that a study of history tells us, it's that things can get worse, and also that when people thought they were in the end times, they weren't."
- Neil Gaiman

“It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful country-side."
- Sherlock Holmes, "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"

"Oh, my friend, consider. 'Very nice people.' That has been, before now, a motive for muder."
- Hercule Poirot, "Mrs. McGinty's Dead"

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”
― Flannery O'Connor

"You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind."
- Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, "Dune"

"Like a bird on the wire

Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free"
- Leonard Cohen

NOTE:  Kris Kristofferson once said that he wanted those lines of Leonard Cohen's to be his epitaph.  (Link)

"Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."
- H. L. Mencken, "The Divine Afflatus" in New York Evening Mail (16 November 1917)

"Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober."
- Raymond Chandler

"She keeps trying and you’ve got to be careful or you’ll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you’re tired of disbelieving her."
- Nick Charles, "The Thin Man"

Rex Stout

"I think the detective story is by far the best upholder of the democratic doctrine in literature. I mean, there couldn't have been detective stories until there were democracies, because the very foundation of the detective story is the thesis that if you're guilty you'll get it in the neck and if you're innocent you can't possibly be harmed. No matter who you are."
- Rex Stout, "Invitation to Learning"

"If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there's no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little kids can't do it; babies are morally monsters—completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy."
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Magician Interview in The Guardian."


"All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening."
- Alexander Woollcott

"Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Yes? Well socialism is exactly the reverse."
-Czech joke, quoted in "Funeral in Berlin" by Len Deighton

“There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart, — and always to plead it successfully.”
- Anthony Trollope, "Orley Farm"

"Beauty may stop the sun and the sea, but dreams are the language of time."

- Eve Fisher

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides the will of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring. In which case, you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought."
- Gandalf, "The Fellowship of the Ring"