Synopses & Reviews
The right quotation can change your life. That compressed idea--expressed in just a few words, a sentence or two--can shift your thinking, trigger an epiphany, alter your way of seeing the world. The wisest, most experienced, and most thoughtful people in history have left us these little thought-bombs. And this book collects them: surprising, jolting, discomforting, and comforting insights into living a full, unbridled life, questioning authority and reality, relating to fellow humans, creating, risking, loving, living with uncertainty, and staying sane in an insane world.
Poets, philosophers, scientists, musicians, artists, presidents, mystics, activists, academics, and others rub shoulders, giving us the benefit of their hard-earned wisdom, breakthroughs, breakdowns, bad choices, sudden illuminations, and lightning wit. Sharing some of life's most important lessons are William Blake and Bruce Lee, Abraham Lincoln and Lorrie Moore, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Terence McKenna, René Magritte and St. Teresa of Avila, Zelda Fitzgerald and James Baldwin, and hundreds more.
Neatly arranged into topics we wonder about, Flash Wisdom's rousing insights and challenging thoughts will appeal to anyone who is searching, anyone who doesn't fit in, anyone who questions the way things are...which is to say, all of us.
About the Author
Russ Kick is known for his groundbreaking and uniquely informative books, which have sold over half a million copies. He is the editor of the three-volume anthology
The Graphic Canon: The World's Greatest Literature as Comics and Visuals (Seven Stories Press). NPR said it is "easily the most ambitious and successfully realized literary project in recent memory,"
School Library Journal called it "startlingly brilliant" and "a masterpiece," and Booklist declared it "a profound work of art." The third volume was a
New York Times bestseller.
Russ has also edited megaselling anthologies You Are Being Lied To and Everything You Know Is Wrong, and has written several nonfiction books, including the cult classic 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know (all from Disinformation Books). The New York Times has dubbed him "an information archaeologist," Details magazine described him as "a Renaissance man," and Utne Reader named him one of its "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."