top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Writer
"This is a revolution, damnit! We're going to have to offend somebody!"
25
"I don't have any fancy story, about the way we fell in love.It was that one awkward move, and the next I remember, I was looking at you."
25
"You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution."
25
"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?"
25
"The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean."
25
"Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied."
25
"I don't copy recipes without trying them out. I don't reprint without trying them again."
25
"I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now."
25
"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."
25
"What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula."
25
"In the early West, law and politics were parallel roads to usefulness as well as distinction."
25
"I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free."
25
"Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you at the breakfast table, follows you to work in the morning. You have to make accommodations and broker deals to soften the rabbit punches that loss brings to your daily life. You have to take the word "loser" and add it to your resume and walk around with it on your name tag as it hand-feeds you your own shit in dosages too large for even great beasts to swallow. The word "loser" follows you, bird-dogs you, sniffs you out of whatever fields you hide in because you have to face things clearly and you cannot turn away from what is true."
25
"For discipline is the channel in which our acts run strong and deep; where there is no direction, the deeds of men run shallow and wander and are wasted."
25
"The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart."
25
"Wit is the most rascally, contemptible, beggarly thing on the face of the earth."
25
"I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them."
25
"But when you're in love, you're not in control of what you think or say or do. And there is nothing I love more than control, and nothing I love less than not having it. So you tell me -what is a person like me supposed to do with a feeling like that?"
25
"What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip."
25
"September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible."
25
"One must always forgive another's passion."
25
"Through him speaks a shrewd and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom a profound, old, terrible, and unimaginably various experience of life. But he himself is young: impatient, inexperienced. He stands higher than we stand, seeing wider, but he is himself only the height of a man."
25
"Opportunities to share love and compassion are all around us. Its going to take an army of compassionate people to heal our world. How will you show yours?"
25
"Surely one of the most visible lessons taught by the twentieth century has been the existence, not so much of a number of different realities, but of a number of different lenses with which to see the same reality."
25
"I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed."
25
"We seldom find people ungrateful so long as it is thought we can serve them."
25
bottom of page