“A book may only be judged for what it is, not what you'd like it to be.”
7 January 2007
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2007
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Caitlín R. Kiernan 45
writer 1964Related quotes

Source: Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

Address to Chapman University students http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/08/30/scalia.re.enactment.ap/index.html (2005).
2000s
“A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.”
Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (1992).

“One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.”

“Most men judge only by their senses and let themselves be persuaded by what they see.”
The Other World (1657)
Context: Most men judge only by their senses and let themselves be persuaded by what they see. Just as the man whose boat sails from shore to shore thinks he is stationary and that the shore moves, men turn with the earth under the sky and have believed that the sky was turning above them. On top of that, insufferable vanity has convinced humans that nature has been made only for them, as though the sun, a huge body four hundred and thirty-four times as large as the earth, had been lit only to ripen our crab apples and cabbages.
I am not one to give in to the insolence of those brutes. I think the planets are worlds revolving around the sun and that the fixed stars are also suns that have planets revolving around them. We can't see those worlds from here because they are so small and because the light they reflect cannot reach us. How can one honestly think that such spacious globes are only large, deserted fields? And that our world was made to lord it over all of them just because a dozen or so vain wretches like us happen to be crawling around on it? Do people really think that because the sun gives us light every day and year, it was made only to keep us from bumping into walls? No, no, this visible god gives light to man by accident, as a king's torch accidentally shines upon a working man or burglar passing in the street.

“You know you're brilliant, but maybe you'd like to understand what you did 2 weeks from now.”
Linux 1.3.53 CodingStyle documentation, 2011-08-13, 1995 https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst,
1990s, 1995-99

“They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?”
Source: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry