Chen Jie Quotes & Sayings

If you can't take the heat, don't tickle the dragon. — Scott Fahlman

Our host drifted away, and Vidia and I continued chatting about this and that. Swift judgments came down. The simplicity in Hemingway was "bogus" and nothing, Vidia said, like his own. Things Fall Apart was a fine book, but Achebe's refusal to write about his decades in America was disappointing. Heart of Darkness was good, but structurally a failure. I asked him about the biography by Patrick French, The World Is What It Is, which he had authorized. He stiffened. That book, which was extraordinarily well written, was also shocking in the extent to which it revealed a nasty, petty, and insecure man. "One gives away so much in trust," Vidia said. "One expects a certain discretion. It's painful, it's painful. But that's quite all right. Others will be written. The record will be corrected." He sounded like a boy being brave after gashing his thumb. The — Teju Cole

There are two kinds of people who blow through life like a breeze, And one kind is gossipers, and the other kind is gossipees. — Ogden Nash

Anyone who tells you they know the future is telling you the most grotesque lie, because none of us do, — Tim Waterstone

The issue regarding the soul's relation to the state is posed with great force by Plato but also by More, not only in his fictional Utopia but also in later life when the issue would arise in a dramatically personal way because he found that neither laws nor rhetorical speech could save him from execution for a silence that he insisted was required by his soul.6 — Gerard B. Wegemer

About a month ago some kids in my neighborhood were playing hide-and-go-seek and one of them ended up in an abandoned refrigerator. It's all anybody talked about for weeks. I said, 'Who cares? How many kids you know get to die a winner? — Anthony Jeselnik

We are alone in confronting a different state of affairs; as we see it, there is a new kind of psychical material intervening between the content of the dream and the results of our reflections: the latent dream-content reached by our procedure, or the dream-thoughts. It is from this latent content, not the manifest, that we worked out the solution to the dream. — Sigmund Freud