quotes about Pleats

“The age of the book is not over. No way... But maybe the age of some books is over. People say to me sometimes 'Steve, are you ever going to write a straight novel, a serious novel' and by that they mean a novel about college professors who are having impotence problems or something like that. And I have to say those things just don't interest me. Why? I don't know. But it took me about twenty years to get over that question, and not be kind of ashamed about what I do, of the books I write.”

“Finding like-minded people is very important. It's hard to be a happy meal in a room full of sad people.”

“Instead of judging people, we need to pray.”

“Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.”

Source : Roy Blount, Jr. (2009). “Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South”, p.18, Knopf

“A dead end street is a good place to turn around. Can't really fault the logic of that, unless you want to go down the dead end of course!”

“The speech of one who knows what he is talking about and means what he says-it is thought on fire.”

“If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win.”

“Of course I'm ambitious. What's wrong with that? Otherwise you sleep all day.”

“The essence of knowledge is generalization. That fire can be produced by rubbing wood in a certain way is a knowledge derived by generalization from individual experiences; the statement means that rubbing wood in this way will always produce fire. The art of discovery is therefore the art of correct generalization. ... The separation of relevant from irrelevant factors is the beginning of knowledge.”

Source : Hans Reichenbach (1973). “The Rise of Scientific Philosophy”, p.5, Univ of California Press

“I cannot agree with those who think of the Bill of Rights as an 18th century straitjacket, unsuited for this age...The evils it guards against are not only old, they are with us now, they exist today.”