Top 29 Quotes & Sayings by James Richardson

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Metaphor isn't just a fancy turn of speech. It shapes our thoughts and feelings, reaches out to grasp new experience, and even binds our five disparate senses. James Geary's fascinating and utterly readable I is an Other brings the news on metaphor from literature and economics, from neuroscience and politics, illuminating topics from consumer behavior to autism spectrum disorders to the evolution of language. As a writer, as a teacher, and as someone just plain fascinated by how our minds work, I've been waiting years for exactly this book.

If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.

There are silences harder to take back than words.

You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.

The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.

I don't know what's meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.

All work is the avoidance of harder work.

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.

How sure we are that everyone's watching. How sure we are that no one sees.

Anger has been ready to be angry.

They say productivity is the key to confidence, and confidence ... to productivity. And they're happy walking back and forth between these two rooms, each the excuse for the other.

It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.

Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks.

Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.

The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.

Sophistication is upscale conformity.

It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.

I would never accuse Willie Brown of slowing down, because he never does.

Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one.

Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.

Too much apology doubles the offense.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else's lines.

What is more yours than what always holds you back?

Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.

I'm a kid checking mail, a kid on his cell with his questions: are we in love, Life, are we exclusive, are we forever?

If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.