Paul Collins > Quotes

“Curb your fretting, tadpole, or the frog of your future will fail to croak.'
-Thaddeus”
― Paul Collins, Dragonsight

“Captain, sir,' called Coster from the rear of the shed. 'Cleared to shit.'
'Proceed,' Fa'ared called back.
The Preceptor glared at Coster. 'Can you not wait?”
― Paul Collins, Dragonfang

“But above all, an author must write passionately and edit passionately.”
― Paul Collins

“William pondered what his next discovery might be. He knew that readers were vexed by the possibility that their Bard might have been Catholic. There is, after all, that suspicious reference to Purgatory by the ghost of Hamlet’s father. In an era when anti-Catholic legislation was favorably viewed by many, such papist skullduggery was improper in a national literary hero. And so, on Christmas Day of 1794, William presented his nation with a fine gift—Shakespeare’s Profession of Faith, in which he disowns any Catholic sympathies. His father was awed by the import of this, so much so that he could no longer keep the discoveries secret. All holiday frivolity was to be set aside now. —”
― Paul Collins, Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck

“Isn’t that the hypocrisy of violence? That we do unto others what we are appalled by when they do it unto us?”
― Paul Collins, Wardragon

“A future owned by yellow journalism was not one most reporters wished to contemplate. Some libraries had already barred the "World" and the "Journal" from their precincts, with one Brooklyn librarian sniffing that they attracted 'an undesirable class of readers.”
― Paul Collins

“We forget all the time. We forget very nearly every single impression that passes through our minds. What we ate for lunch: who our roommate was ten years ago: what we pid for a soda in 1982: what we just came from the living room to the kitchen for. It is constant and vital, and we only notice it if everyday useful things go missing. Every moment gets thrown out like so much garbage - which, in a sense, is what the past is. Memory is a toxin, and its overretention - the constant replaying of the past - is the hallmark of stress disorders and clinical depression. The elimination of memory is a bodily function, like the elimination of urine. Stop urinating and you have renal failure: stop forgetting and you go mad. And so it is that the details of nearly every single day that we have lived, nearly every single moment of each day, nearly every person that we have met and spoken to, the exact wording kf the paragraph that you have just read... gone.”
― Paul Collins, The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine

“Fowler's philosophy [of phrenology] is all about the possibility and real hope of change. Calvinistic predestination and hellfire are swept away in an instant; if the brain and its resultant behavior is malleable throughout one's life, then nobody is fated to remain bad: they can mend their ways and their selves... Bad actions became the correctable result of improper development, rather than machinations of some cloven-footed prat with a fiery pitchfork. What Fowler holds out is nothung less than the promise of redemption. Will it surprise you at all when, at long last, Fowler tears aside his scientific raiments, and reveals what he has been all along: a minister leading his flock heavenward? "[Let us] redouble our efforts for... that high and holy destiny hereafter as such by this great principle of ILLIMITABLE PROGRESSION!" Indeed. Look carefully around this empty plaza: what you see is nothing less than the birthplace of American progressivisim.”
― Paul Collins, The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine

“Above all, an author must write passionately and edit dispassionately. Poe's willingness to ruthlessly strip down and rebuild his old poems showed a dedication to craft that a professional must have, one that quickly wilts most amateurs.”
― Paul Collins