Verso Quotes & Sayings

Even the worst thing has two good verso-sides. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Reading the [The Verso Book of Dissent] is like encountering the best version of our angry selves. — Jonathan Messinger

In so far as I listen with interest to a record, it's usually to figure out how it was arrived at. The musical end product is where interest starts to flag. It's a bit like jigsaw puzzles. Emptied out of the box, there's a heap of pieces, all shapes, sizes and colours, in themselves attractive and could add up to anything
intriguing. Figuring out how to put them together can be interesting, but what you finish up with as often as not is a picture of unsurpassed banality. Music's like that."
From "Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation" by Ben Watson, Verso, London, 2004, p. 440. — Derek Bailey

It became easy for me to detach myself from the course of life, so that while my hands and mind were engaged in the common affairs of every day, my spirit maintained its attitude of communion with God. — John G. Lake

I'm not the kind of artist that wants to get a sound, refine it, and do it 'til I'm 50 so that it's the purest amber of my one way ... — Doseone

Curious People
Soledad, five, daughter of Juanita Fernandez: "Why don't dogs eat dessert?"
Vera, six, daughter of Elsa Villagra: "Where does night sleep? Does night sleep here under the bed?"
Luis, seven, son of Francisca Bermudez: "Will God be angry if I don't believe in him? I don't know how to tell him."
Marcos, nine, son of Silvia Awad: "If God made himself, how did he make his back?"
Carlitos, forty, son of Maria Scaglione: "Mama, how old was I when you weaned me? My psychiatrist wants to know. — Eduardo Galeano

Because the true perfection of a practical occupation consists not only in knowing the actual performance of the occupation but also in its explanation, why the work is done a in a particular way, and because the art of calculating is a practical occupation, it is clear that it is pertinent to concern oneself with the theory. — Gersonides

Your pony, he said as he stomped toward me. "I'm the farrier who is here to fix your pony."
"I thought you were a Hells Angel," I said.
"I used to be," he replied. "But fighting all the time and being really drunk and nasty got boring. So now I just take care of animals. — Jack Gantos

What is destiny - a mechanical fact, a theoretical possibility, a concept, a superstition, a mere word? Ian McCullough was inclined to think one or another of these depending upon his mood. Destiny, the seemingly benign verso of fate. — Joyce Carol Oates

In Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy (Verso, 1997), Kim Moody cites studies finding an increase in stress-related workplace injuries and illness between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s. He argues that rising stress levels reflect a new system of "management by stress" in which workers in a variety of industries are being squeezed to extract maximum productivity, to the detriment of their health. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The best time to tell your story is when you have to tell your story. When it's not really a choice. But then, when you get that first, messy, complicated version down, you have to read it over and be very tough on yourself and ask, 'Well what's the story here?' If you're lucky enough to have someone you trust looking over your shoulder, he or she can help you if [you] lack perspective on your own story. — Jeannette Walls