Benjamin Myers > Quotes

“Krieg ist Krieg: Er wird von wenigen angezettelt und von vielen gefuehrt, und am Ende verlieren alle.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“Fuck the king because you can be sure the king is already fucking you.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Gallows Pole

“And after all there are only a few things truly worth fighting for: freedom, of course, and all that it brings with it. Poetry, perhaps, and a good glass of wine. A nice meal. Nature. Love, if you're lucky. And that's about it.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“Travel is a search for the self . . . and sometimes just to search is enough. [. . .] Wander around long enough with your eyes open and soon enough you'll find things. Great journeys are never about the destination.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“Trust me when I say that everything you've ever felt has been experienced by another human being before you. You may not think so, but its true.

That is what poetry is. It exists to remind us of this very fact. Poetry is mankind's way of saying that we are not entirely alone in the world; it offers a voice of comfort to resonate down through the ages like a lone foghorn's mournful call in the nautical night. Poetry is a stepladder between the centuries, from ancient Greece to tomorrow afternoon. Your problem is you just haven't been introduced to the pure poets - those who hit the head and the heart. The masters. But luckily for you, you have pitched at the right place. I'd say it is almost as if it were fate, if I could bring myself to believe in such an ethereal concept.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“The collapse of what once was had been comprised of dozens of gestures, scores of things left unsaid and hundreds of resentments spread over the thousand days that all stacked up to create millions of tiny moments of muffled misery.”
― Benjamin Myers, Male Tears

“When the bread had been eaten, and we had each had an apple, and the teapot had been drained so that all hat was left was a wadded clot of nettle leaves sitting in some dirty green residue, Dulcie leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.

'Thank you for the lack of conversation. Silence is indeed golden.'

'You're welcome,' I said.

'You don't say much, and I like that. There is poetry in silence but most don't stop to hear it. They just talk, talk, talk, but say nothing because they are afraid of hearing their own heartbeat. Afraid of their own mortality.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“Some say owls carry within them the souls of those who in life never had a name, a place or a purpose, and were cast out to wander alone. Some say their stained-glass eyes are windows into other worlds.”
― Benjamin Myers, Cuddy

“I was neither old enough to have made myself a heron young enough to have escaped the newsreel images or the long dark shadows that the returning soldiers dragged behind them like empty coffins. For no one ever really wins a war: some just lose a little less than others.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“At times like this, or when hoeing soil or sanding wood, or just sitting on a bench with my face turned to the sun, I appeared to slip out of the moment so entirely - or, conversely, perhaps was so deeply immersed in the here and now - that I forgot who I was. The slate of self was wiped.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“Romantik ist naemlich nicht gleichbedeutend mit Herzschmerz und Rosen. Romantik ist Gefuehl, und Romantik ist Freiheit. Romantik ist Abenteuer und Natur und Wanderlust. Sie ist Meeresrauschen und der Regen auf deiner Zeltplane und ein Bussard hoch ueber einer Wiese und das morgendliche Erwachen mit der Frage, was der Tag wohl bringen mag, um dann loszuziehen und es herauszufinden. Das ist Romantik.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“David Hartley appeared of the earth, of the moors. A man of smoke and peat and heather and fire, his body built for the hills. Where one began the other ended.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Gallows Pole

“Presented incorrectly and out of context it will put you off for life, but a good poem shucks the oyster shell of one's mind to reveal the pearl within. It gives words to those feelings whose definitions are forever beyond the reach of verbal articulation.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“For no one ever really wins a war: some just lose a little less than others”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“The half mile walk down steep slopes to Hebden Bridge might as well have been a thousand times that; Heptonstall was its own world, a cloud land of scratching rain and whirlpool skies.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Gallows Pole

“Yes my sleep it was diysturbed by the sound of the moore tryin to get into my room an the sound of the moore tryin to get into my bed and the moore tryin to get into my mind becors it can do that can the moore and no man can sleep in that state no Not unless thur in a coffing.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Gallows Pole

“I've just remembered we're lacking clotted cream. Scones without proper cream is a disaster of apocalyptic proportions.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“The toothpaste's out of the tube now. There's no putting it back in again.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Perfect Golden Circle

“Scout Rock is remarkable in the eyes of those who have decided it is so. Anything can be if it is willed into being: a pebble shaped by centuries of tumbling in the oceanic backwash, a single falling feather so light it barely succumbs to gravity, a mysterious gash in the landscape dense with trees, now fenced off and left to rewild itself.”
― Benjamin Myers, Under The Rock: The Poetry of a Place

“Because that’s what they were like. People. They gossiped. They celebrated the misfortune of others. They loved to hate as much as they loved their other sins and they always needed targets. That hate had to go somewhere otherwise it would chew them up inside and make them take a hard look at themselves and no-one likes to do that because they rarely like what they see.”
― Benjamin Myers, Beastings

“I'm old enough to know that the world stays much the same, continued their father. Rain falls and puddles gather. Puddles become streams and streams become rivers. Leaves grow and leaves fall and the sun always sets westwards. The moor is the moor and the wind always blows.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Gallows Pole

“These are the men who become our bank managers, financiers and politicians power-drunk on their own sense of entitlement.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“the ages like a stagheads run that pushes out through the wuddlands and into the gorzy purplin hethur.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Gallows Pole

“He finds himself nostalgic for a time he has never known.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Gallows Pole

“They occupied no-man's-land between adolescence and adulthood, where insecurity and innocence, joy and world-weary cynicism do battle, where different masks are tried on for size”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“Ostension. A process by which real-life actions are unconsciously modelled on a legend, thereby narrated into praxis. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or seeing ghosts in an old house that you have been told is haunted.”
― Benjamin Myers, These Darkening Days

“For Calvert is a human cactus, spiky and self-contained. He draws upon a deep well of resources.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Perfect Golden Circle

“War was an illness in a way, treatable only by the passing of time, and many were stricken until the end of their days.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“We’ve got more than our fair share of Bible-thumpers round here as it is. The old joyless fire-and-brimstone-and-two-fucks-a-lifetime Christian lot.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“the ouzo having oiled away their inhibitions.”
― Benjamin Myers, These Darkening Days