A Quote by David Samuels
Reading requires a loner's temperament, a high tolerance for silence, and an unhealthy preference for the company of people who are imaginary or dead.
Related Quotes
No one can learn tolerance in a climate of irresponsibility, which does not produce democracy. The act of tolerating requires a climate in which limits may be established, in which there are principles to be respected. That is why tolerance is not coexistence with the intolerable. Under an authoritarian regime, in which authority is abused, or a permissive one, in which freedom is not limited, one can hardly learn tolerance. Tolerance requires respect, discipline, and ethics.
I always considered myself a loner. I mean, not like a poor-me, Byron-esque, I-should-have-brought-a-swimming-buddy loner. I mean the sort of person who doesn’t feel too upset about the prospect of a weekend spent seeing no one, and reading good books on the couch. It wasn’t like I was a people hater or anything. I enjoyed activities and the company of friends. But they were a side dish. I always thought I would be happy without them.
I think in terms of being a New Yorker, as my friends would say, I don't take a lot of mess. I have no tolerance for people who are not thinking deeply about things. I have no tolerance for the kind of small talk that people need to fill silence. And I have no tolerance for people not - just not being a part of the world and being in it and trying to change it.
Tolerance obviously requires a non-contentious manner of relating toward one another’s differences. But tolerance does not require abandoning one’s standards or one’s opinions on political or public policy choices. Tolerance is a way of reacting to diversity, not a command to insulate it from examination.
I was a loner as a child. I had an imaginary friend - I didn't bother with him.
I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.
The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age and with rereading.
I was such a nerd in high school, I didn't even have imaginary friends, I had imaginary bullies.
The world consists of imaginary people, claiming imaginary virtues and suffering from imaginary happiness.
Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.
How to raise this dead level of theistic belief is really a matter of life and death for all denominations. Therefore their tolerance; but it is a tolerance not of understanding; but of weakness.
Creating a high-functioning education system requires all the strategies involved in building high-functioning organisations anywhere. It requires a deliberate and aggressive strategy to ensure extraordinary talent at every level of the system, from the superintendentcy to district offices to principalships to classrooms. It requires building systems for accountability; offering parents the ability to choose their public schools is the ultimate form of this. It requires building a strong culture at the system and school levels based on high expectations for student achievement.
Investing requires qualities of temperament way more than it requires qualities of intellect.
My tolerance for crazy people is, I think, high a tolerance as you're ever going to find. I love being around David Allen Coe. I would have loved to hang out with Tiny Tim. I can listen to Sun Ra on a tape-recording rant.
I tend to be a loner ? I think a lot of social theorists are like that. On one level, the majority of the most important people to me are people who I have imaginary conversations with in the deep of the night: I'm often in conversation with Max Weber or Karl Marx or someone like that. Those are the people I'm closest to and that have had the most influence on me!
I was a real loner in high school, even though people assume I was the head cheerleader.
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