Atheist Bus Quotes

Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London … "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." … The word that offends against realism here is "enjoy." I'm sorry - enjoy your life? Enjoy your life? I'm not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion … Only sometimes, when you're being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to what's happening to you where you'll gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, you'll be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion … This really is a bizarre category error.
But not necessarily an innocent one … The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren't being "worried" by us believer … Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What's so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks?
… Suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on you ~ Francis Spufford

I had abandoned Elana; I deserved her uncertainty. I closed my eyes and focused on her touch. Perhaps she wouldn't have understood had I tried to explain it to her, but to me Elana was not only Elana--she was the sad-eyed love of mine who used to bag groceries at Woodley's in Buffalo; she was the sweet one who always sat across from me on the city bus in Niagara Falls; she was the girl I'd picked up hitchhiking in Mobile and dropped off in New Orleans, brash, full of sarcastic humor, but truly lonely and scared; she was the one I'd nabbed pinching Newports for her dad from the Marathon station I'd worked at in Bakersfield (I'd softened and paid for the pack myself); yes, she was the girl playing basketball with all the boys in the park, collecting cans by the side of the road, keeping secret pet kittens in an empty boxcar in the woods, walking alone at night through the rail yards, teaching her little sisters how to kiss, reading out loud to herself, so absorbed by the story, singing sadly in the tub, building a fort from the junked cars out in the meadow, by herself in the front row at the black-and-white movies or in the alley, gazing at an eddy of cigarette stubs and trash and fall leaves, smoking her first cigarette at dusk by a pile of dead brush in the desert, then wishing at the stars-she was all of them, and she was so much more that was just her that I still didn't know. ~ Davy Rothbart

In the Negro Leagues, we'd play three games a day on the weekends. Then we'd ride the bus and travel to play the next day someplace else. You'd hang your shirt out the bus window to dry. ~ Ray Dandridge

I was on my bus, and on my bus I have a yoga swing. Jennifes comes on, and she goes, ' Hi, Woody, I'm J
is that a sex swing?' Her first sentence to me. ~ Woody Harrelson

There will never be peace until God's house and God's people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world. How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy money changers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top ... There is absolutely no way that government can operate successfully unless led by godly men and women operating under the laws of the God of Jacob ~ Pat Robertson

I am not an atheist. I simply believe in a god different from yours ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

I put my hand on him. Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeeled together on the bus. I couldnt explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stiching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Oftentimes, a funny situation is funny because it's uncomfortable or weird. The most memorable stories, or the stuff that you repeat to your friends, it's not like, "Oh, I had a pleasant day, nothing happened on the bus today." It's when strange things happen, when you become uncomfortable or knocked out of your own reality, those are the things that are interesting. ~ John C. Reilly

I can never be an atheist, because God is our celestial hope for our existential worries, our cosmic chance against absurdity! MMI ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Believers believe in resurrection, atheists only in comebacks. ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Whoever considers the study of anatomy, I believe will never be an atheist; the frame of man's body, and coherence of his parts, being so strange and paradoxical, that I hold it to be the greatest miracle of nature. ~ Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert Of Cherbury

Please give me a single reason why I shouldn't hurl myself beneath the wheels of that bus. ~ Neal Shusterman

What happens in our lives is not really anybody's fault but our own ... When I was in high school, I was in an atheist crowd, and it was the consensus that religion was a crutch. ~ Gillian Anderson

I find myself by default an atheist but fairly unhappily so. It would be bloody marvelous if there was a god. ~ Marcus Brigstocke

The death of a child is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

That was his moment in Leningrad, on an empty street, when his life became possible - when Alexander became possible. There he stood as he was - a young Red Army officer in dissolution, all his days stamped with no future and all his appetites unrestrained, on patrol the day war started for Russia. He stood with his rifle slung on his shoulder and cast his wanton eyes on her, eating her ice cream all sunny, singing, blonde, blossoming, breathtaking. He gazed at her with his entire unknowable life in front of him, and this is what he was thinking ...
To cross the street or not to cross?
To follow her? To hop on the bus, after her? What absolute madness. ~ Paullina Simons

I would have liked to say, "I'm a doctor," to those who asked me what I did, doctors being the current purveyors of magic and miracle. But I'm sure we would have had a bus accident around the next bend, and with all eyes fixed on me I would have to explain, amidst the crying and moaning of victims ... I would have to confess that as a matter of fact it was a bachelor's in philosophy; next, to the shouts of what meaning such a bloody tragedy could have, I would have to admit that I had hardly touched kierkegaard; and so on. ~ Yann Martel

Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds. ~ Madalyn Murray O'Hair

Who are beneficiaries of the Court's protection? Members of various minorities including criminals, atheists, homosexuals, flag burners, illegal immigrants (including terrorists), convicts, and pornographers. ~ Pat Buchanan

She had what's known as inner life and didn't know it. She lived off herself as if eating her own entrails. When she went to work she looked like a gentle lunatic because as the bus went along she daydreamed in loud and dazzling dreams. These dreams, because of all that interiority, were empty because they lacked the essential nucelus of⁠ - of ecstasy, let's say. Most of the time she had without realizing it the void that fills the souls of the saints. Was she a saint? So it seems. She didn't know what she was meditating because she didn't know what the word meant. But it seems to me that her life was a long meditation on the nothing. Except she needed others in order to believe in herself, otherwise she'd get lost in the successive and round emptiness inside her. She meditated while she was typing and that's why she made even more mistakes. ~ Clarice Lispector

There's nothing else in this world the color of a school bus. They call it yellow but it's not quite yellow, and it's not orange either. I'd say it's something somewhere in between margarine and Velveeta. It's not a natural color. Then again I guess if we wanted kids to grow up natural we wouldn't put them on a school bus in the first place. ~ Jon Clinch

In theory, I would like to lead a transparent life. I wold like my life to be as clear as a new pane of glass, without anything shameful and no dark shadows. I would like that. But if I am completely honest, I have to acknowledge secrets too painful to even tell myself. There are things I consider in the deep dark of night, secret terrors. Why are they secrets? I could easily tell either of my parents how I feel, but what would they say? Don't worry, darling, we will do our best never to die? We will never ever leave you, never contract cancer or walk in front of a bus or collapse of old age? We will not leave you alone, not ever, to navigate the world and all of its complexities without us? ~ Meg Rosoff

Most Christians are afraid that people will think for themselves; most atheists are afraid that they won't. ~ Dan Barker

If in doubt about what to do in a place, just start walking through your new environment. Walk until your day becomes interesting - even if this means wandering out of town and strolling the countryside. Eventually you'll see a scene or meet a person that makes your walk worthwhile. If you get "lost" in the process, just take a bus or taxi to a local landmark and find your way back to your hotel from there. ~ Rolf Potts

I'm one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat. ~ Paul Farmer

Some who are far from atheists, may make themselves merry with that conceit of thousands of spirits dancing at once upon a needle's point. ~ Ralph Cudworth

The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell. ~ David Nicholls

In the 'bullshit department' a businessman can't hold a candle to a clergyman. ~ George Carlin

I loved school. I loved new shoes and lunch boxes and sharp pencils. I would hold dance contests in tiny finished basements with my friends. I roller-skated in my driveway and walked home from the bus stop on my own. We never locked our door. I had a younger brother whom I loved and also liked. I thought my mother was the most beautiful mother in the world and my father was a superhero who would always protect me. I wish this feeling for every child on earth. ~ Amy Poehler

The surname of an atheist is compound unfortunate plus being, therefore unfortunate-beings, making all atheists unfortunate beings because human beings are created by God and not products of big bang atoms undergoing evolution. ~ S. E. Entsua-Mensah

I'm a linear thinking agnostic, but not an atheist folks. ~ Neil Peart

Until you have a child, you won't really understand that you would actually throw yourself in front of a bus for your child. Like, you don't really get it. Like, it's like, 'Hell no.' You know, 'She's only two. I can make another one.' You know? But, you know, you have a baby, and then you actually care about this person. ~ Russell Peters

My whole life has been traveling, so it just seems normal to me, ... I'm able to leave on a bus with eight or nine guys, and I feel really comfortable with it. I've always done it. It's heaps of fun. They're all people I get along with really well. They're all my family, my best friends. ~ Kasey Chambers

You hear stories like that all your life and think: cool, a ghost bus. But now we have to look at this stuff analytically ... a ghost bus?! The "ghost" of a motor vehicle? A public conveyance, presumably, which didn't head towards the light, move on to join the choir invisible in ... bus heaven, the great terminus in the sky, where all good buses go when they ... I don't know, break down, but instead is doomed to ... drive eternally the streets of Earth! How can there be a ghost bus?! ~ Paul Cornell

At least May and Will had grabbed the bus twenty minutes earlier and were probably already at school. They'd gone back the Monday after the funeral. "Luckily" Natalie had passed away over winter break, or at least that's what at least half the out-of-state relatives kept saying. "How nice the kids don't have to miss any school." Luke had to work really hard to bite his tongue. As ~ Emily Bleeker

I want to be the one you turn to for guidance and comfort. I want to create things that become a source of stability for people, some sort of home. Write books that you read until the edges are torn and songs that you listen to in your headphones on a lonely night bus, taking you somewhere far far away.I want to be so sure of my own place in the universe that no one could ever doubt me. What I'm about or what I'm here to do. I want to be a safe aura in a sea of worries and uncertainty. I want to stand for clarity where only chaos seems to grow. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds in the name of destiny and in the name of God. ~ Don Henley

The famous atheist Christopher Hitchens once declared that 'You're expelled from your mother's uterus as if shot from a cannon, towards a barn door studded with old nail files and rusty hooks.' Presumably that was what he had in mind when conceiving his three children. ~ Quentin S. Crisp

If I've been here a long time, I think: I must go to London and speak to someone or see a bus. ~ Julian Clary

I am not an atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. ~ Albert Einstein

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic. ~ Charles Darwin