Quotes about sort
page 4

Bertrand Russell photo
Mark Twain photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood. When I look for my diametric opposite, an immeasurably shabby instinct, I always think of my mother and sister, — it would blaspheme my divinity to think I am related to this sort of canaille.”

The way my mother and sister treat me to this very day is a source of unspeakable horror; a real time bomb is at work here, which can tell with unerring certainty the exact moment I can be hurt — in my highest moments, … because at that point I do not have the strength to resist poison worms …
"Why I Am So Wise", 3, as translated in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (2005) edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, p. 77
Ecce Homo (1888)

Henry Miller photo
Ozzy Osbourne photo
Kurt Vonnegut photo
Miguel de Cervantes photo

“It takes all sorts”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

to make a world
de todos ha de haber en el mundo (literally, “There must be of all [types] in the world”)
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book IV, Ch. 6 / El ingenioso caballero Don Quijote de la Mancha, Capítulo VI

Colson Whitehead photo

“I never know when I start out. You know, I sort of know what the ending is. I know where the characters always end up, and I usually have an image of the last page before I start. I'm a big outliner. But you can't know everything and you have to be open to discovery…”

Colson Whitehead (1969) novelist

On how envisioning an ending allows him to conclude each character’s journey in “Extended interview: Colson Whitehead on writing ‘The Nickel Boys’" https://www.cbsnews.com/news/extended-interview-colson-whitehead-on-writing-the-nickel-boys/ in CBS News (2019 Jul 14)

Jeremy Bentham photo
Teal Swan photo
Quintilian photo

“However many things we may have done, we are yet to a certain degree fresh for that which we are going to begin. Who, on the contrary, would not be stupified if he were to listen to the same teacher of any art, whatever it might be, through the whole day? But by change a person will be recruited, as is the case with respect to food, by varieties of which the stomach is re-invigorated and is fed with several sorts less unsatisfactorily than with one.”

Quintilian (35–96) ancient Roman rhetor

Quamlibet multa egerimus, quodam tamen modo recentes sumus ad id quod incipimus. quis non obtundi potest, si per totum diem cuiuscunque artis unum magistrum ferat? mutatione recreabitur sicut in cibis, quorum diversitate reficitur stomachus et pluribus minore fastidio alitur.
H. E. Butler's translation:
However manifold our activities, in a certain sense we come fresh to each new subject. Who can maintain his attention, if he has to listen for a whole day to one teacher harping on the same subject, be it what it may? Change of studies is like change of foods: the stomach is refreshed by their variety and derives greater nourishment from variety of viands.
Book I, Chapter XII, 5
De Institutione Oratoria (c. 95 AD)

Matt Haig photo
Alice Hoffman photo

“It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too.”

Alice Hoffman (1952) Novelist, young-adult writer, children's writer

Source: Local Girls

Charles Bukowski photo

“I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”

Variant: I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can't feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.
Source: Tales of Ordinary Madness

Susanna Clarke photo
Rick Riordan photo
Scott Lynch photo
Rick Riordan photo
Milan Kundera photo
Gertrude Stein photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo

“It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

The Man Upstairs (1914)
Source: The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

Don Marquis photo
Jane Austen photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo
Susanna Clarke photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Cassandra Clare photo
A.A. Milne photo

“I did know once, only I've sort of forgotten.”

Source: Winnie-the-Pooh

Alexandre Dumas photo

“For there are two distinct sorts of ideas: Those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart.”

Variant: ... for there are two distinct sorts of ideas, those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart.
Source: The Count of Monte Cristo

Malcolm Gladwell photo

“Acquaintances, in sort, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: 引爆趨勢 : 小改變如何引發大流行 [Yin bao qu shi: xiao gai bian ru he yin fa da liu xing]

Susanna Clarke photo

“To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.”

Variant: I have a scholar's love of silence and solitude. To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.
Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Suzanne Collins photo
Sherman Alexie photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Thomas Hardy photo
Confucius photo
Toni Morrison photo
Gerald Durrell photo
David Foster Wallace photo

“the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.”

Source: Infinite Jest (1996)
Context: These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light—the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

John Kennedy Toole photo
James Madison photo
Dave Barry photo
Ernest Cline photo
Scott Lynch photo
Janet Fitch photo

“I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.”

Variant: I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.
Source: White Oleander

Augusten Burroughs photo
Rudyard Kipling photo
Katherine Mansfield photo

“Would you not like to try all sorts of lives — one is so very small — but that is the satisfaction of writing — one can impersonate so many people.”

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand author

Letter to Sylvia Payne (24 April 1906), from The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1984-1996), vol. I

Iain Banks photo
Kim Stanley Robinson photo
Cassandra Clare photo
James A. Owen photo
Bryan Lee O'Malley photo
Meg Cabot photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
Louisa May Alcott photo
Dorothy L. Sayers photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo
Douglas Adams photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
E.M. Forster photo
Jonathan Safran Foer photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo
Georges Bataille photo
William James photo
Sarah Dessen photo
Robin McKinley photo
Kenneth Grahame photo

“Badger hates Society, and invitations, and dinner, and all that sort of thing.”

Source: The Wind in the Willows (1908), Ch. 3

Douglas Adams photo
Jon Ronson photo

“Psychopaths [make] the world go around… society [is] an expression of that particular sort of madness… I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?”

Jon Ronson (1967) British journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio presenter and nonfiction author

Source: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

David Foster Wallace photo
Anne McCaffrey photo
John Buchan photo

“It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Source: The 39 Steps

Stephen King photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Cassandra Clare photo
H.L. Mencken photo

“In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

As quoted in Charting the Candidates '72 (1972) by Ronald Van Doren, p. 7
1940s–present
Context: The state — or, to make the matter more concrete, the government — consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee photo
Jodi Picoult photo
Robert Anton Wilson photo

“Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Source: Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

Chuck Palahniuk photo

“Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.”

Variant: Today is just one of those days the sun comes out to really humiliate you.
Source: Fight Club

Maxwell Maltz photo

“You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.”

Maxwell Maltz (1889–1975) Plastic surgeon, self-help author

Source: Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life

A. Lee Martinez photo

“Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Yukon Ho!

Dr. Seuss photo
George Eliot photo