John Phillips > Quotes

“Waves crack with wicked fury against me ship's hull while ocean currents rage as the full moon rises o're the sea."
(Cutthroat's Omen: A Crimson Dawn)”
― Capt. John Phillips circa 1723

“Goodness without knowledge... is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous.... Both united form the noblest character and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind. Many men went a walking and many crippled men, did not.”
― John Phillips

“But if Sade's work is to be summed up in one word, this word would not be 'sexual' or 'comic' or even 'sadistic', it would be 'transgressive'. As it systematically transgresses all sexual, social, religious and moral norms, his writing repeatedly and earnestly insists on the exquisite pleasure to be derived from this transgression.”
― John Phillips, SADE

“One night, after forgetting I’d swallowed one of Woody’s Kentucky Derby sedatives, I served myself a Smirnoff-and-tonic Daisy Cutter that immediately whispered to my brain, “Big mistake, Bolo Bob.”
― John Phillips, Four Miles West of Nowhere: A City Boy's First Year in the Montana Wilderness

“the kind of political petrified wood that doubles as Mitch McConnell’s brain.”
― John Phillips, Four Miles West of Nowhere: A City Boy's First Year in the Montana Wilderness

“Like the female body for the Sadean libertine, God is simultaneously an object of intense fascination and of immeasurable contempt.”
― John Phillips, The Marquis de Sade: A Very Short Introduction

“You might wanna choose a bank for collisions—left or right—then stick with it.” Under my navigational hand, the boat became a marine pinball. Dave’s dog barfed.”
― John Phillips, Four Miles West of Nowhere: A City Boy's First Year in the Montana Wilderness

“To read Sade against the background of our own monstrosity is sometimes the most frightening thing of all. Indeed, this is what makes Sade unreadable for some: not the obscenity or even the sadism, but the sheer hopelessness of his vision of the world and of human nature.”
― John Phillips, SADE

“In this sampler, Yale University Press presents chapters from three of its acclaimed and immensely readable books on the region.”
― John Phillips, Crisis in the Arab World

“mile from us lives neighbor Mike Phillips, off the grid. His motto is, “No more mergers and acquisitions.” If he owns something he doesn’t use for 24 months, he “Goodwills it” or burns it. He’s like Bruce Chatwin: “Things filled men with fear: the more things they had, the more they had to fear. Things had a way of riveting themselves on to the soul and then telling the soul what to do.”
― John Phillips, Four Miles West of Nowhere: A City Boy's First Year in the Montana Wilderness

“I must go through life a jack of all trades, and wanting. Am I to be cursed with dilettantism till I die? [...] Am I, the most inveterate and consistent worshipper of the shrine of Beauty in all my life never to accomplish something beautiful?”
― John Phillips, Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921