Quotes by Writers - Page 174

… for overstrong was the command to hold fast to each smallest particle of time, to the smallest particle of every circumstance, and to embody all of them in memory as if they could be preserved in memory through all deaths for all times.
Hermann Broch
There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.
José Saramago
Life is a long agonized illness only curable by death.
Spike Milligan
I'd like to die listening to a piece of music. I imagine this as so easy, so natural, but naturally it's quite impossible. Notes stab too softly. The wounds they leave behind may smart, but they don't fester. Melancholy and pain trickle out instead of blood. When the notes cease, all is peaceful within me again.
Robert Walser
The most important thing I learnt on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When any Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia.
Mervyn Peake
In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence. A kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die and how many are killed; but, from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A Power, a violence, at once hidden and palpable. . . has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others. . . And who [in this general carnage] exterminates him who will exterminate all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man. . . The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.
Joseph de Maistre
Pentru mine, moartea este doar hotarul unde încetează să mai existe "mâine". Numai până acolo poți să iubești, să visezi, să regreți. Brusc, tot ce n-ai făcut va rămâne pentru totdeauna nefăcut.
Octavian Paler
If you are a Buddhist, inspire yourself by thinking of the bodhisattva. If you are a Christian, think of the Christ, who came not to be served by others but to serve them in joy, in peace, and in generosity. For these things, these are not mere words, but acts, which go all the way, right up to their last breath. Even their death is a gift, and resurrection is born from this kind of death. (157)
Jean-Yves Leloup
As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.
Samuel Johnson
(On his gravestone): "I told you I was ill".
Spike Milligan
For death is life. It is only living that is lifeless.
Mervyn Peake
When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die. . . . (90)
Joseph Campbell
Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.
Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
I've never been in love. I will die without knowing what it feels like to need to see one person's face when you go to sleep at night, to crave seeing it when you wake up. I wish I knew.
Libba Bray
Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that "I" and all other "things" now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them - to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.
Alan W. Watts
I tried to hang myself with a bungee cord. I kept almost dying.
Steven Wright
Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.
Roger Zelazny
Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live
Charles Caleb Colton
Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy?
Libba Bray
We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.
Liam Callanan
What is this thing you call substance abuse? All I wanna do is forget and get loose.Drinking and smoking over and overWhat's so great about a life that's sober?There's nothing cool about being youngWhen the monsters of night have stolen the sun.I'm tired of searching for words in the sky.All I wanna do is drink and die. Nothing is real. It's all a big lie. All I wanna do is drink and die. There's nothing cool about being youngWhen the monsters of night have stolen the sun.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.
The Nightvale Podcast
I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.
Alberto Manguel
But to mourn, that's different. To mourn is to be eaten alive with homesickness for the person.
Olive Ann Burns
I guess I just couldn't see standing there -- alive, talking, thinking, breathing, being -- one second, and dead the next. It really bothered me. Death by violence isn't the same as dying any other way, accident or disease or old age. It just ain't the same.
S.E. Hinton
What happens if you get scared half to death twice?
Steven Wright
No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive.
Banana Yoshimoto
I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.
Roger Zelazny
That is not dead which can eternal lie,And with strange aeons even death may die.
H.P. Lovecraft
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rage at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas
In all my lives, the only thing I've seen save people from themselves is hope. Hope beyond logic. Hope beyond what the eye can see. Filled with hope, the human spirit is an insatiable force of energy, transcending biology to embrace something eternal. Without hope, the spirit dies and nothing awaits but death.
Terry Moore
...there's nothing wrong with being a little hopeful. Who says you can't warm your frozen limbs in the faint heat of a flicker of hope?
Banana Yoshimoto
Per qualche motivo anche solo assistere mi aveva fatto venir voglia di uccidere qualunque parte di me provasse del desiderio. Qualunque parte di me stesse ancora aspettando qualcosa da qualcuno, speranzosa.
Merritt Tierce
I don't know when and I don't know how, but you'll get through this. And you'll kick life in the balls just as hard as it's kicked you.
Hester Young
So I tried my best to stifle hope. Because hope's twin was despair, and despair was infinitely worse. If hope hurt, then despair was the absence of hurt. It was the absence of feeling. It was the absence of caring. I wanted very much to care.
S. Jae-Jones
Trap. Horrible trap. At one’s birth it is sprung. Some last day must arrive. When you will need to get out of this body. Bad enough. Then we bring a baby here. The terms of the trap are compounded. That baby also must depart. All pleasures should be tainted by that knowledge. But hopeful dear us, we forget. Lord, what is this?
George Saunders
If this turns to friendship, it only meansThat one of us will suffer.That when we meet after the worst of endings,There will only be this skein of words between us—Most of them for boredom, fewer for loneliness—Rising out of our mutual space of breath, leavingBehind a bluer sky each moment of departure.And one of us will cling on to its blue,Hung on partings like a muted cloud, whileThe other rides on a wing of word away from here.
Cyril Wong
De bomen komen uit de gronden uit hun stam de twijgen.En iedereen vindt het heel gewoondat zij weer bladeren krijgen.We zien ze vallen naar de gronden dan opnieuw weer groeien.Zo heeft de aarde ons geleerddat al wat sterft zal bloeien.
Toon Hermans
I want things to change in The Nameless City. I want the people in the city to finally have some influence over its future. We've never had that before. If there's something I can do to make this council of nations happen, I want to know about it. Don't tell me not to be worried. Tell me how to help.
Faith Erin Hicks
The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past was troubling. I longed for a future too, with hope in it. The desire to be free, awakened my determination to act, to think , and to speak.
Frederick Douglass
There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, andnot in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever ismore than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or Icould not live.
H.G.Wells
Over time, I have come to believe that there is a killer and a saint in all of us. But...I choose to focus on the future and the *potential* in people.
Agnes Kamara-umunna
Then every man would be as a god, you see. The result of this, of course, would be that there would no longer be any gods, only men. We would give them knowledge of the sciences and the arts, which we possess, and in so doing we would destroy their simple faith and remove all basis for their hoping that things will be better—for the best way to destroy faith or hope is to let it be realized.
Roger Zelazny
Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi.I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs.My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.
Forrest J. Ackerman
We can ast for comfort and hope and patience and courage . . . and we’ll git what we ast for. They ain’t no gar’ntee thet we ain’t go’n have no troubles and ain’t go’n die. But shore as frogs croak and cows bellow, God’ll forgive us if’n we ast Him to.
Olive Ann Burns
Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation.
Whittaker Chambers
Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross.
Thomas Malory
Hope is some extraordinary spiritual grace that God gives us to control our fears, not to oust them.
Vincent McNabb
Once a day has begun eventfully, it generally carries on being every bit as lively.
Albert Ehrenstein
If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.
Alberto Manguel
In all my wanderings through this world of care,In all my griefs -- and God has given my share --I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown,Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down;To husband out life's taper at the close,And keep the flame from wasting, by repose:I still had hopes, for pride attends us still,Amidst the swains to show my book-learn'd skill,Around my fire an evening group to draw,And tell of all I felt, and all I saw;And, as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,Pants to the place from whence at first she flew,I still had hopes, my long vexations past,Here to return -- and die at home at last.
Oliver Goldsmith
Hope without love is hopeless.
Dejan Stojanovic
I hope I make people feel better. I hope I take people out of their situations a little bit and make them happier. That's really why I do what I do.
Ellen DeGeneres
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing
Raymond Williams
Might. Is there any opiate more powerful than that word?
Libba Bray
Summertime. It was a song. It was a season. I wondered if that season would ever live inside of me.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.
H.G.Wells
That which causes us trials shall yield us triumph: and that which make our hearts ache shall fill us with gladness. The only true happiness is to learn, to advance, and to improve: which could not happen unless we had commenced with error, ignorance, and imperfection. We must pass through the darkness, to reach the light.
Albert Pike