Derek Raymond > Quotes

“She doesn’t think she’s worthy to live. But she doesn’t realize, she is life.”
― Derek Raymond, He Died With His Eyes Open

“Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.”
― Derek Raymond, He Died With His Eyes Open

“Every day you amass knowledge in a frantic race against death that death must win. You want to find out everything in the time you have; yet in the end you wonder why you bothered, it'll all be lost. I keep trying to explain this to anyone who will listen.”
― Derek Raymond, He Died With His Eyes Open

“I have taken a terrible beating from the truth and feel tamed, wise and desperate, as if I had taken a short route to wisdom through a mirror, and cut myself badly on it as I passed through.”
― Derek Raymond, He Died With His Eyes Open

“...perhaps, when it got utterly dark, the peace of the darkness would become the same as light so that my last experience would become as mysterious and musical as my first, so that in my last darkness there might not be the same need of understanding anything so far away as the world anymore.”
― Derek Raymond, He Died With His Eyes Open

“Death is its own best friend, and our dreams know it.”
― Derek Raymond, How the Dead Live

“As soon as he was half-awake he slipped his knickers off. Holding them close to his face, he handled them loosely for a moment with an absent expression, then suddenly buried his nose in them, his dark eyes huge, his face monstrous with the wisdom of evil. As well as the blood and the seepage from last night's ejaculation he had shit himself lavishly in his sleep, a sloppy, yellow liquid. Having spent a while burying his face in them, he folded the knickers up and put them carefully to one side on top of a stack of others. He would never wash them; he would never wear them again. Every secretion that had occurred in his underclothes, before, during, or sometimes just after a moment of action was a souvenir to be preciously kept and safeguarded.”
― Derek Raymond, I Was Dora Suarez

“I became as hard as whipcord, but with a brain like cottonwool.”
― Derek Raymond, He Died With His Eyes Open

“It seems to me that no matter whether you marry, settle down or live with a bird or not, certain ones simply have your number on them, like bombs in the war; and even if you don’t happen to like them all that much there’s nothing you can do about it — unless you’re prepared to spend a lifetime arguing fate out of existence, which you could probably do if you tried but I’m not the type.
—Crust on Its Uppers, p. 87”
― Derek Raymond

“I studied him and realized that madness is the last defence of the mind when it can't hope to reconcile itself with events; I too was standing between routine and the unknowable.”
― Derek Raymond, How the Dead Live

“It's wearying, like Caliban buttonholing you in hell and telling you the struggle he's having getting along with himself.”
― Derek Raymond, The Crust on its Uppers

“I knocked at a second-floor flat in a dreary house, one of two hundred in a dreary Catford street.”
― Derek Raymond, The Devil's Home On Leave

“A quick butchers shows up Old Bill three-handed, also a particularly nasty female grass–-and if looks were acid baths the two she collects from us would reduce her to gristle quicker than Mrs. Durand-Deacon.”
― Derek Raymond, The Crust on its Uppers

“You Englishmen,’ said Herr Wurter. ‘You are all the same. Wherever you are you behave as if you were at home and your word was law.”
― Derek Raymond, The Crust on its Uppers

“I’ve come to believe that what we need is a republic. People need to be run by people who like them, not boxed into a game they can’t win by people who can’t lose it. We need a head of state who’s been on the run. An interior minister who’s had the two o’clock knock and done solitary. A minister of agriculture who’s seen a spade fired in anger and done twenty years on the land. A health minister who’s had his life saved through swift transportation to a well-staffed, properly equipped hospital. An interior minister dedicated to dismantling the state with its futile bureaucratic waste and saving real money. And a police force that would put an end to the Bowmans of this world.”
― Derek Raymond, Dead Man Upright

“I looked at this man. He was in his fifites, mostly bones inside hisblack suit, and gave off an odour, if you were as close up to him as I was, of a long-closed keyboard opened suddenly in an empty house. (73)”
― Derek Raymond, How the Dead Live

“All the evil in the world is powerless against intelligence and courage.”
― Derek Raymond, He Died With His Eyes Open

“He still didn't believe we could do it to him, and left with the assured insolence of a credit card presenting itself at the thin mouth of hell.”
― Derek Raymond, I Was Dora Suarez

“There are times, I don’t know if they come to everyone, when I feel that the future is beyond my strength: too much horror to deal with and no help to turn to.”
― Derek Raymond, The Devil's Home On Leave: Factory 2

“The eternal cycle, the beginning, middle and end of a human being, the incomprehensible dance in the magic of our own theatre will continue forever. But ignorance of our birth and death makes us largely mad; the majority of us clap at our disasters as though they are a play: but it is a work we cannot possibly understand.”
― Derek Raymond, How the Dead Live

“I said to myself – wait for me in hell, I’ll come to you.”
― Derek Raymond, The Devil's Home On Leave: Factory 2

“Where I go, the ghosts go. I go where the evil is.”
― Derek Raymond, The Devil's Home On Leave: Factory 2

“It’s like the tragedy of the whole world in a little glass,’ she said. ‘Great things are all smashed to pulp, and none of us who are left have the spirit to carry on.”
― Derek Raymond, He Died with His Eyes Open

“Existence is sometimes what a forward artillery observer sees of enemy lines through field glasses. A distant and troubling view brought suddenly into focus with a wealth of obscene detail.”
― Derek Raymond

“I looked at this man. He was in his fifties, mostly bones inside his black suit, and gave off an odour, if you were as close up to him as I was, of a long-closed keyboard opened suddenly in an empty house. (73)”
― Derek Raymond, How the Dead Live

“killers are like the army, dull and dangerous simultaneously.”
― Derek Raymond, The Devil's Home On Leave: Factory 2