Tom Bissell
Quotes by Tom Bissell
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I think the highest purpose of fiction is to show that all people are fundamentally worthy of mercy.
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We are no longer worried that children are missing school because of video games, though. We are worried that they are murdering their classmates because of video games.
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Of that time, there is still much we do not know.
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Reading gives one something to think about other than one's self.
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Most non-readers are nothing but an agglomeration of third-hand opinion and blindly received wisdom.
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An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.
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I could imagine a hot day. I could imagine a number of curious people spontaneously following a young man of great wisdom, a young man rumored to wield power over the mysterious afflictions they saw every day in their villages. They are not sure where they are going, and once the young man stops to speak, they find themselves on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, the nearest town now very far away. Many are feeling hunger pangs, uncertain of why they have come so far. What will they do? One of the young man's friends arrives, unexpectedly bearing food. The people are happy and relieved, and among them talk circulates of the surprising tenderness with which the wise young man hands out victuals to the people, few of whom he knows well.Eventually, the story is written down. Years go by, then decades, and in this time the crowd increases from fifty to five hundred to five thousand. The unexpected arrival of the follower bearing food vanishes from the telling. An event experienced by its participants in miraculous terms is transformed into a miraculous story. The core of the story remains the same: the hungry were fed when they were not expecting to be, and the young man who fed them do so of his own volition. You could base a code of ethics on a single act of unexpected munificence, and perhaps even fashion from it a crude if supple morality, but you would not have a cosmology, or anything close to one, and cosmologies were what most people craved.
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A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.
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Of that time, there is still much we do not know.
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A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.
Read quote
-
An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.
Read quote
-
Reading gives one something to think about other than one's self.
Read quote
-
I think the highest purpose of fiction is to show that all people are fundamentally worthy of mercy.
Read quote
-
I could imagine a hot day. I could imagine a number of curious people spontaneously following a young man of great wisdom, a young man rumored to wield power over the mysterious afflictions they saw every day in their villages. They are not sure where they are going, and once the young man stops to speak, they find themselves on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, the nearest town now very far away. Many are feeling hunger pangs, uncertain of why they have come so far. What will they do? One of the young man's friends arrives, unexpectedly bearing food. The people are happy and relieved, and among them talk circulates of the surprising tenderness with which the wise young man hands out victuals to the people, few of whom he knows well.Eventually, the story is written down. Years go by, then decades, and in this time the crowd increases from fifty to five hundred to five thousand. The unexpected arrival of the follower bearing food vanishes from the telling. An event experienced by its participants in miraculous terms is transformed into a miraculous story. The core of the story remains the same: the hungry were fed when they were not expecting to be, and the young man who fed them do so of his own volition. You could base a code of ethics on a single act of unexpected munificence, and perhaps even fashion from it a crude if supple morality, but you would not have a cosmology, or anything close to one, and cosmologies were what most people craved.
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We are no longer worried that children are missing school because of video games, though. We are worried that they are murdering their classmates because of video games.
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Most non-readers are nothing but an agglomeration of third-hand opinion and blindly received wisdom.
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The average action game doesn't much traffic in thematic grandiosity, but the BioShock games are different.
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