Brian Aldiss Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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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).
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The most sinister aspect of Jack is his detachment, his ability to distance himself from his feelings.
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If there are negative people around me, I just try to distance myself from that.
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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.
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One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We sometimes laugh from ear to ear, but it would be impossible for a smile to be wider than the distance between our eyes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Vanity can apply to both insecurity and egotism. So I distance myself, because I feel everything.
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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.
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In general, any form of exercise, if pursued continuously, will help train us in perseverance. Long-distance running is particularly good training in perseverance.
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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.
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I think you only see experiences as defining moments with distance.
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People ask about art and commercialism. I think that if someone tries to sell their work at a high price, that is the wrong way of doing it.
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In democratic ages men rarely sacrifice themselves for another, but they show a general compassion for all the human race. One never sees them inflict pointless suffering, and they are glad to relieve the sorrows of others when they can do so without much trouble to themselves. They are not disinterested, but they are gentle.
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I'd never seen anyone go truly, old-school berserkergang, but that scream...It was like hearing an echo rolling down through the centuries from an ancient world, a more savage world, now lost to the mists of time. And suddenly I had no trouble at all believing her age.
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The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us.
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Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
