“Progress is unstoppable. It is a drumbeat to which we must all march. Technology helps and good ideas spread – these are two lows of nature. If you don’t let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood!”
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
“I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“Everybody has to feel superior to somebody,” she said. “But it’s customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.”
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.”
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
“Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.”
— Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
“It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.”
— Ian Fleming, Goldfinger
“I assure you. I have no notion of treating men with such respect. That is the way to spoil them.”
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
“If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
