Malcolm David Brown > Malcolm's Quotes

“I, Father, belong to another heresy: ‘Always uneasy.’ I have been battling ever since my childhood.”
“Battling with whom?”
I hesitated. Suddenly I was terror-stricken.
“With whom?” the monk repeated. Then, leaning over to me and lowering his voice: “With God?”
“Yes.”
The old man riveted his eyes on me without speaking.
“Could this be a disease, Father? How can I be cured?”
“May you never be cured!”
He raised his hand as though to bless—or curse—me.
“Alas if you had to wrestle with your equal or inferior. But since you are wrestling with God, alas if you are ever cured of this disease.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

“It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be possible to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and panelled halls.”
― Hugh of Saint Victor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts

“God is a story,” he said. “I believe in stories, and God knows this. Stories are real, my boy. They matter. If you lose your belief in your story, you vill lose yourself.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“That's all civilization is, a giant mill grinding out gossip.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man.”
― William Blake

“Animals don't behave like men,' he said. 'If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Some say owls carry within them the souls of those who in life never had a name, a place or a purpose, and were cast out to wander alone. Some say their stained-glass eyes are windows into other worlds.”
― Benjamin Myers, Cuddy

“Do you think that Mr Pitt really cares whether we have Louis executed?’
‘Personally? Oh no, no one gives a damn for Louis. But they think it is a bad precedent to cut off monarch’s heads.’
‘It was the English who set the precedent.’
‘They try to forget that.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“We mortals are the immortals' work battalion.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

“Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden

Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“Like our minds, Urizen has no knowledge of what he doesn’t know and deep down this terrifies him, because it threatens his very sense of identity. He will attempt to belittle, mock, or otherwise deny evidence that there is more than he knows, and that he is not the powerful creator he thinks he is. Deeply insecure, Urizen is the aspect of our minds that needs not just to be right, but to be thought of as right. You will recognise him immediately if you use social media.”
― John Higgs, William Blake vs. the World

“A pious man explained to his followers: 'It is evil to take lives and noble to save them. Each day I pledge to save a hundred lives. I drop my net in the lake and scoop out a hundred fishes. I place the fishes on the bank, where they flop and twirl. "Don't be scared," I tell those fishes. "I am saving you from drowning." Soon enough, the fishes grow calm and lie still. Yet, sad to say, I am always too late. The fishes expire. And because it is evil to waste anything, I take those dead fishes to market and I sell them for a good price. With the money I receive, I buy more nets so I can save more fishes.”
― Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning

“Paddy Booz tells of meeting a Taoist Grand Master on the streets of a provincial Chinese city. The man was wearing his Grand Master’s blue robes and high hat. He and his young disciple had walked the length and breadth of China.
'But what', Paddy asked him, 'did you do during the Cultural Revolution?'
'I went for a walk in the Kun L’ung Mountains.”
― Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Until recently, I didn’t think that humans could choose
loneliness. That there were sometimes forces more powerful than the wish to avoid loneliness.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

“Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Even as the Blue Marble was miniaturizing your conception of Earth, it was inflating your sense of importance in relation to it, endowing you a godlike perspective and agency. The image caused, in other words, a derangement of scale, from which you people still suffer. As your anxiety about the disastrous effects of your behavior on the biosphere grows, you console yourself with the thought that by changing a light bulb or recycling a bottle or choosing paper instead of plastic, you can save the planet.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Young man, nature is not frightening, it's people who are frightening! You just need to get to know nature and it will become friendly. This creature known as man is of course highly intelligent, he's capable of manufacturing almost anything from rumours to test-tube babies and yet he destroys two to three species every day. This is the absurdity of man.”
― Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain

“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“When a faith stubbornly maintained comes into contact with learning, the product of that encounter is always something magnificent, whether it be for good or ill.”
― Luther Blissett, Q: A Deadly Historical Thriller – Papal Spy Hunts Heretic Through Reformation Europe

“Anyone with enough intelligence to understand the world and too little to learn to live, cannot hope for anything but martyrdom.”
― Luther Blissett, Q: A Deadly Historical Thriller – Papal Spy Hunts Heretic Through Reformation Europe

“Old George Orwell got it backward.Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed.He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled.And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino said, ‘when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,’ he said, ‘to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn’t yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.”
― Umberto Eco, Baudolino

“God is a lamp without flame, a flame without fire, a fire without heat, a dark light, a silent rumble, a blind flash, a luminous soot, a ray of his own darkness, a circle that expands concentrating on its own center, a solitary multiplicity...”
― Umberto Eco, Baudolino

“When man begins to think that he is responsible for writing the script of the world, he forgets the forces that dream up our reality.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War