Cam Roberts > Cam's Quotes

“Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The turmoil of the day freezes in a thousand absurd postures.”
― Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

“I know the place

I know the place.
It is true.
Everything we do
Corrects the space
Between death and me
And you.”
― Harold Pinter

“The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.”
― Harold Pinter

“I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.”
― Harold Pinter

“There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.”
― Harold Pinter

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I'm not young enough to know everything.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Admirable Crichton

“One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.”
― Harold Pinter, Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics

“When you lead a life of scholarship you can't be bothered with the humorous realities, you know, tits, that kind of thing.”
― Harold Pinter, Ashes to Ashes

“The carrion birds sat about the topmost corners of the houses with their wings outstretched in attitudes of exhortation like dark little bishops.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she'd see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her...and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.”
― John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

“What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.”
― Edward Albee

“What could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it”
― Edward Albee

“The day is breaking someone else's heart.”
― James Merrill

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
― T.S. Eliot

“I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity”
― T.S. Eliot

“Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.”
― Paul Auster