Horatio Clare > Quotes

“This is the happy time, I tell myself. I am superstitious about happiness. I worry that too much celebration of immanence, of God-goodness and life force, invites its opposite. Some pagan part of me believes that too much light draws darkness.”
― Horatio Clare, The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal – A journey towards hope

“It doesn't make any sense, does it?"
"Some things don't," said the beetle, gloomily.
"Don't be so sure," Aubrey said. "Everything makes sense if you can find the right way to look at it. What we need is a new perspective.”
― Horatio Clare, Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot

“Too much certainty is a miserable thing, while the unknowable has a pristine beauty and a wonder with no end.”
― Horatio Clare

“Sea is safety, land is danger.”
― Horatio Clare, Down To The Sea In Ships: Of Ageless Oceans and Modern Men

“To have any goal in your life is to forget about the uselessness of life. To think of interesting ideas. - Isvan Moldovan”
― Horatio Clare, Orison for a Curlew: In Search of a Bird on the Edge of Extinction

“The boys are caught between a private conversation among themselves, a world only they can understand, and their awareness of the artist, the adult observer looking and listening. They remind me of us, of me and my fellow patients, the garments of the adult world not quite fitting us, the jumbled machinery of the day-to-day not quite belonging to us, asked to give an account of ourselves and unsure quite what to say.”
― Horatio Clare, Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing

“The words with which a breakdown is treated are all medicalised - illness, treatment, nurse, doctor, meds - but the mechanism of treatment belongs to retribution: incarnation, surveillance, behaviour monitoring, parole. For crimes against normality, we get a label and a chemical life sentence. I hate this mechanism. I refuse to believe in it.”
― Horatio Clare, Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing