Brian Aldiss Quotes

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

Brian Aldiss

• Distance

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Quotes to Explore

• Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood's complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we'd say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself from these in his autobiographical fiction).

  

  Edmund White
  • Reading
  • Distance
  • Say

• The most sinister aspect of Jack is his detachment, his ability to distance himself from his feelings.

  

  Victor Garber
  • Feelings
  • Ability
  • Distance

• If there are negative people around me, I just try to distance myself from that.

  

  Zach LaVine
  • People
  • Me
  • Myself

• Everything has become so easy. It's great that it's at your fingertips, but I miss those good old days. And we're connected, but it can be very alienating. There is this distance between all of us because we're speaking to each other through cameras and monitors and icons and Emojis.

  

  Rami Malek
  • Good
  • Great
  • Distance

• One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.

  

  Victor Hugo
  • Distance
  • Qualities
  • Close

• My silver cord – the link between my body and my spirit – was extremely sensitive. It was what allowed me to sense dreamscapes at a distance. It could also snap me back into my skin.

  

  Samantha Shannon
  • Body
  • Spirit
  • Distance

• Do more than is required. What is the distance between someone who achieves their goals consistently and those who spend their lives and careers merely following? The extra mile.

  

  Gary Ryan Blair
  • Business
  • Goals
  • Distance

• A novelist's lack of awareness of and critical distance to his own body of work is due to a phenomenon that I have noticed in myself and many others: as soon as it is written, every new book erases the last one, leaving me with the impression that I have forgotten it.

  

  Patrick Modiano
  • Work
  • Book
  • Myself

• We sometimes laugh from ear to ear, but it would be impossible for a smile to be wider than the distance between our eyes.

  

  Malcolm de Chazal
  • Eyes
  • Smile
  • Distance

• When it comes to inmates, we have boiled them down to just the few things we know about them - their crime, their current life situation, their identification number. But the reality is they were something before they were their crime.

  

  Uzo Aduba
  • Life
  • Reality
  • Situation

• I'm exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator.

  

  Galen Rowell
  • Feeling
  • Spiritual
  • Emotional

• To be consistently effective, you must put a certain distance between yourself and what happens to you on the golf course. This is not indifference, it's detachment.

  

  Sam Snead
  • Yourself
  • Golf
  • Distance

• Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.

  

  Rainer Maria Rilke
  • Human
  • Distance
  • Wonderful

• One of the most unsettling things about 'Monologue' is its long silences, in which the man sits alone, staring into the middle distance, without grip of his narrative, lost to the past.

  

  Samantha Harvey
  • Long
  • Man
  • Past

• Vanity can apply to both insecurity and egotism. So I distance myself, because I feel everything.

  

  Taylor Swift
  • Myself
  • Distance
  • Insecurity

• Scarce any problem will appear more hard and difficult, than that of determining the distance of the Sun from the Earth very near the truth: but even this... will without much labour be effected.

  

  Edmond Halley
  • Truth
  • Earth
  • Problem

• In general, any form of exercise, if pursued continuously, will help train us in perseverance. Long-distance running is particularly good training in perseverance.

  

  Mao Zedong
  • Good
  • Long
  • Help

• The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.

  

  Washington Irving
  • Literature
  • Distance
  • View

• At the end of the day, when it comes down to it, all we really want is to be close to somebody. So this thing where we all keep our distance and pretend not to care about each other, it's usually a load of bull. So we pick and choose who we want to remain close to, and once we've chosen those people, we tend to stick close by. No matter how much we hurt them. The people that are still with you at the end of the day, those are the ones worth keeping. And sure, sometimes close can be too close. But sometimes, that invasion of personal space, it can be exactly what you need.

  

  Shonda Rhimes
  • Sometimes
  • Care
  • Hurt

• It's not how many hours you put in with a client or on a project. It's the quantity and quality of your energy - your focus and force - that determine whether that time is valuable.

  

  Jim Loehr
  • Time
  • Energy
  • Focus

• I write because something inner and unconscious forces me to. That is the first compulsion. The second is one of ethical and moral duty. I feel responsible to tell stories that inspire readers to consider more deeply who they are.

  

  David Guterson
  • Moral

• For Kips Bay, I had a wonderful client, William Zeckendorf, who was willing to gamble with me on using concrete and not brick for a high-rise apartment building. That was very innovative at the time.

  

  I. M. Pei
  • Time
  • High
  • Wonderful

• Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

  

  Brian Aldiss
  • Distance