47+ Joshua Ferris Quotes On Religion, Bible And Funny

Joshua Ferris is an American author of fiction and non-fiction. He is best known for his debut novel Then We Came to the End, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His other works include The Unnamed, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, and The Dinner Party. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Joshua Ferris on leadership, life, love.

Top 10 Joshua Ferris Quotes

1. I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.
2. All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making.
3. That's one of the things about comedy - I think it works best when it's contextualized, as opposed to kind of an island of cleverness.
4. We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.
5. We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy.
6. A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.
7. One thing that I discovered about myself is I really don't like traveling. I feel like it's a terrible personal failing, but I was so satisfied to arrive at the conclusion.
8. It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it's inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.
9. My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.
10. Humor is a very big part of life, and if you exclude humor from your book, you're not capturing a very important part of human experience.

Joshua Ferris Short Quotes

• The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.
• I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.
• A dentist is only half the doctor he claims to be.
• It is really irritating to work with irritating people
• I know what to do with my life. I just don't know what to do with this one night.
• To conform is to lose your soul
• Without work, so much of one's identity just evaporates.
• Things could be worse and things could be so much better.
• Everything was always something but something – and here was the rub – could never be everything.

Joshua Ferris Famous Quotes And Sayings

Every time you hear someone read your book and liked your book, you're never sure whether that's going to follow with a similar remark from someone else. Perhaps I have low expectations, but whenever I hear someone say, 'I liked your book,' I don't know if it's going to happen again. — Joshua Ferris

Yet for all the depression no one ever quit. When someone quit, we couldn't believe it. 'I'm becoming a rafting instructor on the Colorado River,' they said. 'I'm touring college towns with my garage band.' We were dumbfounded. It was like they were from another planet. Where had they found the derring-do? What would they do about car payments? We got together for going away drinks on their final day and tried to hide our envy while reminding ourselves that we still had the freedom and luxury to shop indiscriminately. — Joshua Ferris

I think one of the ways you avoid being angry is to avoid being angry at the people in power. They might do crappy things, and piss you off, and make bad decisions, but they shouldn't be hated simply because they're in power. And I thought it was important to humanize them if the book was going to be even-handed to all the different ways you encounter people at work. — Joshua Ferris

We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war. — Joshua Ferris

If someone were plucked from the group and given those responsibilities, they might find themselves growing more aloof, just by virtue of that promotion. Suddenly the group culture excludes you. I saw this in my own working life, and I don't think it's a coincidence - I sensed a kind of loneliness in middle managers especially. — Joshua Ferris

We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it. — Joshua Ferris

The office is a romantic enabler because you're always around the person you have a crush on. There's no escape from, and maybe no desire to escape from, those pressure-cooker conditions. And there's an automatic series of things you have to talk about all the time. — Joshua Ferris

The whole time I was writing, I had to fight my normal inclination to be funny, to sort of patch humor in, in order to convey all of the disruptions of the disease to the family dynamic, the loss of individuality, the impact on professional life, and the sanity of the main character. Of course, that's not to say it never sneaks in; there's some black comedy in there, like when he shows up to court wearing a bicycle helmet and won't take it off. — Joshua Ferris

There were times where I felt I was pressing a little bit too hard with the humor, and I had to pull back, because the overriding concern of the book was to create this disease that had no cure and make you pay attention to every emotional stage of what happens. — Joshua Ferris

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one. — Joshua Ferris

Why shouldn't it be that way for the rest of us? Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn't know it could be that easy. I didn't know that until just now. That sounds good to me. — Joshua Ferris

Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never weekend days. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks it felt like we worked ten straight days and had only one day off. — Joshua Ferris

She looks at herself in the mirror. The idea is to look sexy again. And for whom exactly? Yourself, of course. Yes, well, that's all wonderfully self-affirming and very strong-minded as any decent woman should be these days, but let's just face facts here and say that when a woman - no, when a person is thinking about feeling sexy, it is always with the idea of someone else in mind. — Joshua Ferris

I come from a very illustrious line of divorces. We love to get divorced in my family. My mother and father have been married four times each - eight ceremonies with the best of intentions. — Joshua Ferris

Sometimes you have to make decisions that necessarily exclude the collective. It's more difficult to be a friend - even though they know each other and they treat each other like friends, it's more of a challenge for them. It's just institutional fact; the two characters that are the most aloof are the ones who have the most responsibility. — Joshua Ferris

Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts. — Joshua Ferris

The people at the very top could fall by and grace you with their presence and give you a little largesse, and you'd be "Oh, I'm so beloved." In a way, it was kind of like flattery. The middle managers didn't quite have that cachet, but at the same time, they had to seem like they were of that caliber. So there's a little bit of loneliness at the heart of those with a little bit of power. — Joshua Ferris

You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It’s the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I’m alienated from society. — Joshua Ferris

I've always thought things were absurd. It would take a lot more effort for me to see things as reasonable. — Joshua Ferris

I don't write directly on to the computer because I don't think well facing forward with fingers on a keyboard. I think better looking down holding a pen. And the concentration quotient of pen and paper is higher than when I'm moving words around on screen. — Joshua Ferris

I can't trace thematic similarities between Then We Came To The End and The Unnamed to a life event; I think it's more just a natural progression as a writer. Everything changes in the second book - tonally, character-wise, situationally - and on top of that, I think I wanted a challenge. I wanted to see if I could do it. — Joshua Ferris

Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It’s the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into the indescribable. — Joshua Ferris

After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting - an artist - or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office. — Joshua Ferris

We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. — Joshua Ferris

A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day--nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone's mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part. — Joshua Ferris

We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up. — Joshua Ferris

If you can get by with quotes from The Godfather and nothing you say matters, that's pretty bleak, don't you think? Don't we want what we say to matter? — Joshua Ferris

I'm being provided with some emotional ballast by giving me an intimate portrait of one character in particular in contrast to the collective. I'm fortunate that I had very sympathetic readers, but ordinarily - if a book makes you laugh too much, it shifts from "literature" to "entertainment." — Joshua Ferris

Life Lessons by Joshua Ferris

1. Joshua Ferris emphasizes the importance of being honest with yourself and others, no matter how difficult it may be.
2. He also shows that life is unpredictable and it's important to stay open to new experiences and opportunities.
3. Lastly, he teaches that it's important to take risks and have faith in yourself, even when it seems like everything is out of your control.