Pridak Quotes & Sayings

It's worth pointing out that [Herman Melville] worked in [the New York Custom House] as a deputy customs inspector between 1866 and 1885. Nineteen years, and he never got a raise - four dollars a day, six days a week. He was by then a washed-up writer, forgotten and poor. I used to find this subject heartbreaking, a waste: the greatest living American author was forced to spend his days writing tariff reports instead of novels. But now, knowing what I know about the sleaze of the New York Custom House, and the honorable if bitter decency with which Melville did his job, I have come to regard literature's loss as the republic's gain. Great writers are a dime a dozen in New York. But an honest customs inspector in the Gilded Age? Unheard of. — Sarah Vowell

Sorry to be your second choice."
"Don't be stupid. Third choice. Mum's asleep, remember?" He laughs again. — Stephanie Perkins

I should have told you. I guess I ... wanted you to know. I wanted you to know what I needed, but maybe you couldn't understand that what I needed was you."
"Do you need me?"
"I can survive without you, but it's only that. Surviving. I want to live. — Kit Rocha

To be looked at by Susan, naked, with those eyes, over a glass of pink champagne, was all I knew on earth, and all I had to know. — Robert B. Parker

I was an infinitely hot and dense dot. — Mark Leyner

Can I have a look at Uranus too, Lavender? — J.K. Rowling

When you get to be President, there are all those things, the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes, all those things. You have to remember it isn't for you. It's for the Presidency. — Harry S. Truman

It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him. — Joseph Heller

According to Proust, one proof that we are reading a major new writer is that his writing immediately strikes us as ugly. Only minor writers write beautifully, since they simply reflect back to us our preconceived notion of what beauty is; we have no problem understanding what they are up to, since we have seen it many times before. When a writer is truly original, his failure to be conventionally beautiful makes us see him, initially, as shapeless, awkward, or perverse. Only once we have learned how to read him do we realize that this ugliness is really a new, totally unexpected kind of beauty and that what seemed wrong in his writing is exactly what makes him great. — Adam Kirsch

When you can't cheat the game, you'd best find a means to cheat the players. — Scott Lynch

Enjoy the insult as you deliver it, before you learn its cost. — Mason Cooley

People are successful because they think and act like successful people. — Roy Bennett

In your mid-30s, you have to take inventory, or you'll stumble. — Jenny Lewis

Where Voegelin seeks to show the Gnostic nature of modernity, Jonas seeks to show the modern nature of Gnosticism. Jonas draws parallels between ancient Gnosticism and modern, secular existentialism to prove that Gnosticism is existentialist, not that existentialism is Gnostic. For Jonas, both philosophies stress above all the radical alienation of human beings from the world. — C. G. Jung

Women need a reason to have sex; men need only a place. — Nelson DeMille