Top 80 Josiah Bancroft Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Sometimes to enjoy a scene fully, we must first retreat a little way.”

— Josiah Bancroft

2. “Senlin did not believe in that sort of love: sudden and selfish and insatiable. Love, as the poets so often painted it, was just bald lust wearing a pompous wig. He believed true love was more like an education: it was deep and subtle and never complete.”

— Josiah Bancroft

3. “The essential lesson of the zoetrope is this: movement, indeed all progress, even the passage of time, is an illusion. Life is the repetition of stillness.”

— Josiah Bancroft

4. “We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd.”

— Josiah Bancroft

5. “The mob does two things well: nothing and revolution. – I Sip a Cup of Wind by Jumet.”

— Josiah Bancroft

6. “We cannot raise a man up by lowering ourselves, no more than we can save a sunken ship by draining away the sea.”

— Josiah Bancroft

7. “Suits me. I’d rather be a nothing at the center of everything than a puffed-up somebody at the edge of it all.” She said this in her usual unguarded way. And without meaning to, she had described him exactly: a puffed-up somebody at the edge of it all.”

— Josiah Bancroft

8. “Love, as the poets so often painted it, was just bald lust wearing a pompous wig. He believed true love was more like an education: it was deep and subtle and never complete.”

— Josiah Bancroft

9. “It is easier to accept who you’ve become than to recollect who you were.”

— Josiah Bancroft

10. “A man who is not suspicious of a philosophy that appeals to his nature is like the bull comforted by the rutted path that leads to the slaughterhouse. – I Sip a Cup of Wind by Jumet.”

— Josiah Bancroft

11. “I’m suspicious of people who are certain.”

— Josiah Bancroft

12. “I’m pretty sure that’s what hope is. Stubbornness. Refusing to go down.”

— Josiah Bancroft

13. “The rich “learn lessons.” The poor commit crimes. “Mistakes” are generally considered a mark of the middle class.”

— Josiah Bancroft

14. “People only read what they already believe to be true, and if they encounter something that seems to disagree with their beliefs, they bend it into agreement, and if it cannot be bent, then they call it a conspiracy and cast it away!”

— Josiah Bancroft

15. “I suppose books are like a surgeon’s scalpel. The same blade that can kill when wielded by a fool can save lives in the right hands.”

— Josiah Bancroft

16. “I am the riddle in the mouth of the Sphinx. I am the slaver that chews the living chain. I am the farmer of dead seeds, the filler of holes. Who am I?” Senlin answered at a whisper: “Death.”

— Josiah Bancroft

17. “At the round table of color, orange sits supreme. Orange is sublime. Orange is ablaze. And seated across from Lady Orange, we have Sir Purple. I ask you, is any color more vulgar? The word alone emerges like something from a lavatory. Purple. Plopple. It’s all prunes, liver spots, and ink stains. If I ever utter a word of praise for that wretched hue, please snatch my pen away and gore me with it.”

— Josiah Bancroft

18. “If I ever get to the point where I can stand idly by while a child falls to his death, I don’t think I can claim to have priorities of any kind.”

— Josiah Bancroft

19. “Don’t saw off your arm to feed a dog. You only have two arms, and the world is full of dogs.”

— Josiah Bancroft

20. “Never let a rigid itinerary discourage you from an unexpected adventure.”

— Josiah Bancroft

21. “Yes, I hear that people who suffer from brain damage are quite happy. That’s what I always wanted for you, Edith: for you to be happy, no matter how many blows to the head it takes.”

— Josiah Bancroft

22. “Iren looked the Captain and first mate up and down, taking in Edith’s split lip, the gory stains on her tattered scarf and the Captain’s shirt, the sling that pinned her mighty arm to her breast, the gash of blood on his forehead, the glowing dust that frosted them from hat to boot, and the strong smell of smoke wafting from their clothes. “How was the zoo?” she asked.”

— Josiah Bancroft

23. “I’m counting on greed and egotism, forces that are as reliable as gravity.”

— Josiah Bancroft

24. “We all have weaknesses. Not everyone has strengths.” “I.”

— Josiah Bancroft

25. “If the law is malleable, Mr. Senlin, if it bends and conforms to man, then man will become resolute in his flaws. The law exists to give shape to man’s ideals. When you think about it, doesn’t mercy serve the wicked at the expense of the law?”

— Josiah Bancroft

26. “She is imperfect, but absolutely peerless.”

— Josiah Bancroft

27. “But understanding nothing, or very little of the world, and having no desire to understand more than you already do, well, that invites entitlement. What was a privilege becomes a right. And that, I think, is dangerous.”

— Josiah Bancroft

28. “Inevitably, invariably, eventually you will discover you are unprepared to make an informed choice. When in doubt, say, Yes. Yes is the eternal passport. Yes is the everlasting coin.”

— Josiah Bancroft

29. “I am upset because we have pooled our human genius into the building of an elaborate Tower and have filled it up with the same tyrants that have plagued our race since we crawled from the sea. Why does our innovation never extend to our conscience?”

— Josiah Bancroft

30. “History is a love letter to tyrants written in the blood of the overrun, the forgotten, the expunged!”

— Josiah Bancroft

31. “The only event I’m certain to attend is my funeral, and I hope to arrive very, very late.”

— Josiah Bancroft

32. “Memory is not like a box of stationery – easy to browse, reorder, and read. No, memories accumulate like leaves upon the forest floor. They are irregular and fragile. They crumble and break upon inspection. They turn to soil the deeper you go.”

— Josiah Bancroft

33. “Senlin felt like an ambitious weed growing in the deep shade of old trees.”

— Josiah Bancroft

34. “We shouldn’t have to go around congratulating each other for behaving with basic human dignity.”

— Josiah Bancroft

35. “With subjugation comes certainty. Liberty is full of gambles.”

— Josiah Bancroft

36. “If you lie loud and long enough, it eventually becomes the truth. – Oren Robinson of the Daily Reverie.”

— Josiah Bancroft

37. “Do you know what a treaty is, Captain Winters? It is a document that tells us what the next war will be over.”

— Josiah Bancroft

38. “I’ve never been able to connect to characters who suffer some personal tragedy, and then immediately emerge from the disaster toughened and prepared for the journey ahead. It just feels disingenuous. When I’ve experienced setbacks, I don’t rise from the ashes with all the answers. I flail about. I fall over. I take a step back and fall over again. I think that developing strength and wisdom takes time and practice.”

— Josiah Bancroft

39. “Sometimes a wheel squeaks not because it is faulty but because it bears the most weight.”

— Josiah Bancroft

40. “Only people who go to bed early believe in happy endings. We night owls understand that happiness does not dwell in finales. It resides in anticipation, in revelry, and in worn-out welcomes. Endings are always sad.”

— Josiah Bancroft

41. “True conspiracies are inflexible and susceptible to discovery, but imaginary plots are ever evolving and, as a result, invulnerable. That is to say, conspiracies are perishable, paranoia is not.”

— Josiah Bancroft

42. “He understood that accusations made in wrath drew from the proof of emotions rather than the substance of facts, and as such were incontestable.”

— Josiah Bancroft

43. “Learning starts with failure.”

— Josiah Bancroft

44. “The human race will march into the darkness singing songs and telling stories because that is who we are and what we do.”

— Josiah Bancroft

45. “A historian begins with an ending, and then he concocts a pleasing cause.”

— Josiah Bancroft

46. “Intimacy was not about maintaining the idealistic charade of courtship; it was about embracing and adoring the flaws.”

— Josiah Bancroft

47. “The universe breathes in ragged breaths. The body dies. The fungus grows. The loam spreads. The tree roots. The forest burns. The cloud bursts. The flood drowns. The alluvium feeds the fields. In, out. In, out. There is no stasis, no stillness. The source of all misery lies in our insistence that tomorrow be like today. But if it were, if it ever were, it would spell the end of everything.”

— Josiah Bancroft

48. “Senlin could easily tell which porters only became busy at his approach. The hardest workers moved slowly, deliberately, while the lazy appeared eternally fresh and enthusiastic.”

— Josiah Bancroft

49. “A man may rot like an egg: His shell does not show it, but all that is within him has gone foul.”

— Josiah Bancroft

50. “I love a good scandal. There’s nothing more comforting than tut-tutting the public sins of another from the privacy of your own squalor.”

— Josiah Bancroft