Matthew Harbison > Matthew's Quotes

“Once he went into the mountains on a clear, sunny day, and wandered about for a long time with a tormenting thought that refused to take shape. Before him was the shining sky, below him the lake, around him the horizon, bright and infinite, as if it went on forever. For a long time he looked and suffered. He remembered now how he had stretched out his arms to that bright, infinite blue and wept. What had tormented him was that he was a total stranger to it all. What was this banquet, what was this great everlasting feast, to which he had long been drawn, always, ever since childhood, and which he could never join? Every morning the same bright sun rises; every morning there is a rainbow over the waterfall; every evening the highest snowcapped mountain, there, far away, at the edge of the sky, burns with a crimson flame; every little fly that buzzes near him in a hot ray of sunlight participates in this whole chorus: knows its place, loves it, and is happy; every little blade of grass grows and is happy! And everything has its path, and everything knows its path, goes with a song and comes back with a song; only he knows nothing, understands nothing, neither people nor sounds, a stranger to everything and a castaway.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“There is nothing so annoying as to be fairly rich, of a fairly good family,
pleasing presence, average education, to be "not stupid," kindhearted,
and yet to have no talent at all, no originality, not a single idea
of one's own—to be, in fact, "just like everyone else."
Of such people there are countless numbers in this world—far more
even than appear. They can be divided into two classes as all men
can—that is, those of limited intellect, and those who are much cleverer.
The former of these classes is the happier.
To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is
simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that
belief without the slightest misgiving.
Many of our young women have thought fit to cut their hair short, put
on blue spectacles, and call themselves Nihilists. By doing this they have
been able to persuade themselves, without further trouble, that they
have acquired new convictions of their own. Some men have but felt
some little qualm of kindness towards their fellow-men, and the fact has
been quite enough to persuade them that they stand alone in the van of
enlightenment and that no one has such humanitarian feelings as they.
Others have but to read an idea of somebody else's, and they can immediately
assimilate it and believe that it was a child of their own brain.
The "impudence of ignorance," if I may use the expression, is developed
to a wonderful extent in such cases;—unlikely as it appears, it is met
with at every turn.
... those belonged to the other class—to the "much cleverer"
persons, though from head to foot permeated and saturated with
the longing to be original. This class, as I have said above, is far less
happy. For the "clever commonplace" person, though he may possibly
imagine himself a man of genius and originality, none the less has within
his heart the deathless worm of suspicion and doubt; and this doubt
sometimes brings a clever man to despair. (As a rule, however, nothing
tragic happens;—his liver becomes a little damaged in the course of time,
nothing more serious. Such men do not give up their aspirations after
originality without a severe struggle,—and there have been men who,
though good fellows in themselves, and even benefactors to humanity,
have sunk to the level of base criminals for the sake of originality)”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it. Take my word for it, the highest moment if his happiness was just three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew were on the point of returning to Europe in despair. It wasn't the New World that mattered, even if it had fallen to pieces.
Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It's life that matters, nothing but life -- the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“The tears of those who never cry, the calm, the levelheaded ones, are terrible to see. She seemed to be split or torn by the force of the tears, which she squeezed her eyes shut against, which she forced back with her fist against her lips. Smokey, afraid and awed, came immediately to her as he might to rescue his child from a fire, without thought and without knowing quite what he would do. When he tried to take her hand, speak softly to her, she only trembled more violently, the red cross branded on her face grew uglier; so he enveloped her, smothered the flames, Disregarding her resistance, as well as he could he covered her, having a vague idea that he could by tenderness invade her and then rout her grief, whatever it was, by main strength. He wasn't sure he wasn't himself the cause of it, wasn't sure if she would cling to him for comfort or break him in rage, but he had no choice anyway, savior or sacrifice, it didn't matter so long as she could cease suffering.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

“Words are easy, like the wind; faithful friends are hard to find.”
― William Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“We know what we are, but not what we may be.”
― William Shakespeare

“You speak an infinite deal of nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; The thief doth fear each bush an officer.”
― William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 3

“For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
― William Shakespeare, The Sonnets

“The Devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

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

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Where men can't live gods fare no better.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree