Jason W > Jason's Quotes

“His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“The example of a syllogism that he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic: Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal, had throughout his whole life seemed to him right only in relation to Caius, but not to him at all.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
― John Donne, No man is an island – A selection from the prose

“Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“Had I but died an hour before this chance
I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
There's nothing serious in mortality.            
All is but toys, renown and grace is dead,
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“The patient is the one with the disease”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“Disintegration---I'm taking it in stride.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.”
― Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

“No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“We are all worms, But I do believe that I am a glow worm.”
― Winston S. Churchill, Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches

“This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“For what are we born if not to aid one another?”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“I was afraid I was going to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.”
― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road