Top 80 Josiah Bancroft Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “A historian begins with an ending, and then he concocts a pleasing cause.”

— Josiah Bancroft

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

— Josiah Bancroft

53. “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

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

— Josiah Bancroft

55. “You are late, Headmaster.” “Impossible. Headmasters cannot be late,” he said. “The sun must be running fast.”

— Josiah Bancroft

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

— Josiah Bancroft

57. “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

58. “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

59. “When you think little of yourself, everyone else’s opinion of you becomes more important than your own.”

— Josiah Bancroft

60. “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

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

— Josiah Bancroft

62. “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

63. “Those who claim to be “ready for anything” are overpacked and invariably unprepared for the one obstacle every adventurer must eventually face – disappointment.”

— Josiah Bancroft

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

— Josiah Bancroft

65. “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

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

— Josiah Bancroft

67. “All I know is that, at the end of the day, dreams don’t matter, but neither does regret. We aren’t what we want or wish for. We are only what we do.”

— Josiah Bancroft

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Josiah Bancroft

71. “The mob does two things well: nothing and revolution.”

— Josiah Bancroft

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

— Josiah Bancroft

73. “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

74. “Bribery wins more arguments than reason.”

— Josiah Bancroft

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

— Josiah Bancroft

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

— Josiah Bancroft

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

— Josiah Bancroft

78. “The wonderful thing about regrets is that it’s never too late to have them.”

— Josiah Bancroft

79. “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

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

— Josiah Bancroft

81. “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

82. “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

83. “Often the simplest way to unlock a door is to knock upon it.”

— Josiah Bancroft

84. “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

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

— Josiah Bancroft

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

— Josiah Bancroft

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

— Josiah Bancroft

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

— Josiah Bancroft

89. “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