Sam Taylor > Quotes

“But hope, I can tell you, is an exhausting emotion; perhaps, along with fear, the most exhausting of all. It is like juggling eggs: the hope is the shell, and inside is despair. A single crack and the despair might spill everywhere, stain everything.”
― Sam Taylor

“Often, I find, it is better to forget what you know, and to believe only what you can see with your own two eyes.”
― Sam Taylor

“His mistake was to think that, by seeing objectively, he was seeing the street in its entirety. What he didn't see -- what he completely missed -- was the strangest and most remarkable sight in the whole of Lough Street: an unshaven, wild-eyed man sitting in a parked van, staring at an empty house through binoculars and furiously taking notes.”
― Sam Taylor

“I look back at the thousands of days through which I have lived, and feel awed by their inconsequentiality. My life resembles the writing in my diary (or perhaps it’s the other way around): the days, like the sentences, each making a kind of superficial sense of their own, but in the context of the surrounding sentences and days, creating not a narrative or a meaning, but the very opposite: a riddle without solutions, a labyrinth without exits. A chaos.”
― Sam Taylor (, The Amnesiac

“Sometimes the feeling would sneak up on me over a number of days: friendliness, tenderness, slowly growing in the hothouse of my introspection, swelling into something more beautiful and dangerous: a kind of euphoric enchantment. Sadly, this state never lasted more than a couple of days. Because pretty soon, hope-that sly, insinuating monster-would creep into my heart.”
― Sam Taylor

“In order to be happy, James understood, one must have not only life, warmth, food, freedom, comfort, health, company, sleep and sanity, one must also think, every day, of the imminent, everpresent danger of losing these gifts; one must see, feel, breathe the perpetual possibility that one could be dead, cold, hungry, enslaved, in pain, ill, lonely, insomniac or mad. No wonder happiness is so rare, thought James: it is fucking hard work.”
― Sam Taylor, The Amnesiac

“People change, he thought -it's truism- but how? Our life is confined to days, after all: Sunday to Monday, dusk to dawn. What great alterations can take place in someone between breakfast and lunch? Is it possible to wake up as one person and fall asleep as another?”
― Sam Taylor

“That’s the trouble with people who spend all their time thinking. They never actually bloody notice anything.”
― Sam Taylor, The Amnesiac