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The sign stopped me-- or rather, this text stopped me. Words are my profession I seized these and demanded that they explain themselves, that they cease to be ambiguous.

Daniel Quinn

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Daniel Quinn
Age: 82 †
Born: 1935
Born: October 11
Died: 2018
Died: February 17
Autobiographer
Novelist
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Daniel Clarence Quinn
Stopped
Explain
Cease
Sign
Profession
Seized
Rather
Ambiguous
Words
Demanded
Text

More quotes by Daniel Quinn

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Don't wait. Where do you expect to get by waiting? Doing is what teaches you. Doing is what leads to inspiration. Doing is what generates ideas. Nothing else, and nothing less.
Daniel Quinn
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I didn't want a guru or a kung fu master or a spiritual director. I didn't want to become a sorcerer or learn the zen of archery or meditate or align my chakras or uncover mast incarnations...I was after something else entirely, but it wasn't in the Yellow Pages or anywhere else that I could discover.
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This law … defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.
Daniel Quinn
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The journey itself is going to change you, so you don’t have to worry about memorizing the route we took to accomplish that change.
Daniel Quinn
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....he began to speak to me, not in the jocular way of visitors to the menagerie but rather as one speaks to the wind or to the waves crashing on a beach, uttering that which must be said but which must not be heard by anyone.
Daniel Quinn
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Lies are like sleeping pills. You should only use them when you absolutely have to. They spoil everything if you make a habit of them.
Daniel Quinn
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There are times when having too much to say can be as dumbfounding as having too little.
Daniel Quinn
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Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable--and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.
Daniel Quinn
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And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world, or to repair the devastation we've already wrought.
Daniel Quinn
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People will listen when they're ready to listen and not before. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.
Daniel Quinn
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There are indeed times when one should TRUST blindly, just as there are times when one should not. WISDOM consists in being able to tell one from the other.
Daniel Quinn
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Courage is the virtue of the free.
Daniel Quinn
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We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.
Daniel Quinn
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But why? Why do you need prophets to tell you how you ought to live? Why do you need anyone to tell you how you ought to live
Daniel Quinn
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You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.
Daniel Quinn
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The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.
Daniel Quinn
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All paths lie together in the hand of god like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle's or the squirrel's or the sparrow's. All are held together.
Daniel Quinn
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When you send off a short story, it sits on the editor's desk in the same pile with stories by the most famous and honored names in present-day writing-and it's not going to be accepted unless it's as good as theirs. (And it'll probably have to be better.)
Daniel Quinn
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Imagine that the gods have a care for everything that lives in the community of life on earth.
Daniel Quinn
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The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do.
Daniel Quinn