Top 80 Josiah Bancroft Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Often the simplest way to unlock a door is to knock upon it.”

— Josiah Bancroft

52. “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

53. “The handkerchief is the universal utensil of the seasoned traveler. It can be a sanitizing device, a seat cover, a dust mask, a garrote, a bandage, a gag, or a white flag. One may feel well-prepared with nothing but a pocket square.”

— Josiah Bancroft

54. “For a man choked full of esoteric wisdom, he had very little idea what he was capable of. He knew himself but poorly.”

— Josiah Bancroft

55. “The rich “learn lessons.” The poor commit crimes. “Mistakes” are generally.”

— Josiah Bancroft

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

— Josiah Bancroft

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

— Josiah Bancroft

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Josiah Bancroft

61. “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

62. “Learning starts with failure.”

— Josiah Bancroft

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

— Josiah Bancroft

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

— Josiah Bancroft

65. “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

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

— Josiah Bancroft

67. “You have no friends.” Senlin laughed, startling Adam. “That’s what all my friends say.”

— Josiah Bancroft

68. “I am not the man I was,” Senlin said abruptly, as if he were afraid to delay the confession any longer. His friends around the table looked to him expectantly. This would be the apology then, and knowing Senlin it would be long-winded, roundabout, and obscure. They collectively braced themselves for the oration.”

— Josiah Bancroft

69. “You could resent yourself for your imperfect enjoyment of your life, but that seems to me like a never-ending chore. A thankless one, too. I think that if we really knew how good our lives were while they were good, we’d be too scared to do anything, change anything. We’d never take a risk, or explore, or grow. You can hate yourself for not fully appreciating your happy days while you had them, or you could look back and be warmed by the memory, couldn’t you?”

— Josiah Bancroft

70. “I’ve never once in my life looked forward to wearing a dress, so it’s nothing I’ll miss. But I wonder if anyone will ever look me in the eye again, or if they’ll be too busy gawking at this – tractor.” “Nonsense. It’s nothing a nice scarf can’t fix.”

— Josiah Bancroft

71. “Perhaps it was only human to heap perfection upon another person and then worship the figment that resulted.”

— Josiah Bancroft

72. “Every important journey I have undertaken has begun the same: with crushed sheets, a balled pillow, flung open books, and not a wink of sleep.”

— Josiah Bancroft

73. “I grow old in the company of youthful ghosts.”

— Josiah Bancroft

74. “I distrust sweet cocktails and cheerful men for the same reason: It’s hard to tell how dangerous they are until they’ve knocked you on your ear.”

— Josiah Bancroft

75. “Home’ is an exaggeration made true by distance.”

— Josiah Bancroft

76. “We can cower behind oaths and excuses, but it does not change the fact that many are suffering and dying. Perhaps we are not responsible for the crimes of our fathers, but make no mistake, we are beneficiaries of those crimes, which makes us answerable to its victims.”

— Josiah Bancroft

77. “But what was excruciating at first turned cathartic the more he talked. In telling his story, he discovered that he had developed definite ideas about his own motives and decisions. These ideas seemed to have formed in the ether of emotions and dreams, that wooly fog that lay outside the footlights of the conscious mind. They were not large revelations, but were rather like the little epiphanies one suffers and enjoys over a morning cup of tea.”

— Josiah Bancroft

78. “Whatever Marya’s state, whatever mine, I will find her, and I will carry her home.”

— Josiah Bancroft

79. “Of course I have a plan,” he said, clapping his hands. “We are going to die.”

— Josiah Bancroft

80. “My sense of being, my identity, whatever you want to call it, it doesn’t reside in my parts. It lives in my past, and in the continuity of my present thoughts, and in my hopes for the future. I’m more afraid of losing a memory than a limb.”

— Josiah Bancroft

81. “Bribery wins more arguments than reason.”

— Josiah Bancroft

82. “She had to rediscover fear and, tucked somewhere inside that fear, life.”

— Josiah Bancroft

83. “We aren’t what we want or wish for. We are only what we do.”

— Josiah Bancroft

84. “But the human race came into the world with all the physical prowess of a custard.”

— Josiah Bancroft

85. “Perhaps he should turn back. Perhaps this was reckless. But then, what was there to return to? Confusion? Ignorance? The inevitable slide into a life of violence? Surely, it was better to go forward into ruin than backward into rot.”

— Josiah Bancroft

86. “What is a poison to the simple may be a liquor to the wise.”

— Josiah Bancroft

87. “Marya felt the flying birds of her anxiety quiet once more. Rediscovering that she could be of some help and cheer to others tempered her sense of being caught in another ruse. Perhaps the world was not floored with trapdoors. Perhaps not everyone was fake, nor everything false.”

— Josiah Bancroft

88. “I’m glad your self-righteousness has given you some exercise, but you forget: we are not such a tidy, reasonable, and humane race. Our thoughts don’t stand in grammatical rows, our hearts don’t draw equations, our consciences don’t have the benefit of historians whispering the answers to us.”

— Josiah Bancroft

89. “Each spring, the schoolhouse was painted white as a bride, and every year the oceanic elements slowly undressed it.”

— Josiah Bancroft