Steve > Steve's Quotes

“It’s hard to stay away from religion when you mess with acid.”
― Robert Stone

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“I've been riding on the crest of a slump lately.”
― Tom Waits

“Thinking of a series of dreams
Where the time and the tempo fly
And there's no exit in any direction
'Cept the one that you can't see with your eyes”
― Bob Dylan

“Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.”
― Thomas Wolfe

“Once they were men. Now they are land crabs.”
― Roger Corman

“Evil is not good's absence but gravity's
everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains
inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.”
― Geoffrey Hill, Canaan: Poetry of Moral Urgency and Historical Witness―Suffering, Martyrdom, and the Millennium

“The stone that was rolled before Christ's tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher's stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“One cannot launch a new history — the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but ‘progress’ — the mechanical movement of a clock hand, not the sacred succession of interlinked events.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“As the future ripens in the past,
so the past rots in the future --
a terrible festival of dead leaves.”
― Anna Akhmatova, Poems of Akhmatova

“Lookin' back is a bad habit.”
― Charles Portis, True Grit

“Well the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount,
But nothing really matters much it's doom alone that counts.”
― Bob Dylan

“God has created nights well-populated
with dreams, crowded with mirror images,
so that man may feel that he is nothing more
than vain reflection. That's what frightens us.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”
― Sylvia Plath

“Death wears a big hat.”
― Elvis Costello

“It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark.”
― Seamus Heaney, Beowulf

“Sunday just came down like a nine-pound hammer ... it was tainted with the closing-in feeling of the loss of freedom. Because after the sun went down, it came back up on Monday morning. And you had to go to work five more days. And it sucked.”
― Larry Brown, A Miracle of Catfish

“What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“Memory believes before knowing remembers.

[Light in August]”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“Avant Garde is French for bullshit.”
― George Harrison

“She was blond as hell, wearing a lot of black.”
― Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock

“Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.”
― Ossip Mandelstam

“Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual experience, for many of us, amounts mostly to an essential, deeply felt and necessary but ultimately inchoate and transitory feeling of oneness or unity with existence. It is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a thorn in the brain.”
― Christian Wiman

“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights and Other Stories

“I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must try to learn from history.”
― Kenneth Clark, Civilisation

“The Gospel is a harsh document; the Gospel is ruthless and specific in what it says; the Gospel is not meant to be re-worded, watered down and brought to the level of either our understanding or our taste. The Gospel is proclaiming something which is beyond us and which is there to stretch our mind, to widen our heart beyond the bearable at times, to recondition all our life, to give us a world view which is simply the world upside-down and this we are not keen to accept.”
― Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh

“Remember, God didn't say, 'I'm gonna make light now,' he said, 'Let there be light.' His first act was to allow light in to what had been Nothing. Like God, you also have to always work with the light, make it do only what you want it to do.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

“It was the U.S.A., after all, and fear was in the air.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

“Those who take the extreme positions in American political and economic life are always wrong.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems