Matthew Murphy > Matthew's Quotes

“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll

“We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.”
― Jack Kerouac

“If I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody.

Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”
― Anthony Bourdain

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”
― Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach

“the fallen leaves in the forest seemed to make even the ground glow and burn with light”
― Malcolm Lowry, October Ferry to Gabriola

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

“Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live. ”
― Albert Camus

“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“It is better to burn than to disappear.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.”
― Albert Camus

“Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”
― Albert Camus

“He was safe here; this was the place he loved - sanctuary, the paradise of his despair.”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life!”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Every day I discover
more and more
beautiful things.
It’s enough to drive one mad.
I have such a desire
to do everything,
my head is bursting with it.”
― Claude Monet

“The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute.”
― Claude Monet, Monet By Himself

“Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom...is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.”
― Anthony Bourdain

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
― Dylan Thomas, In Country Sleep, and Other Poems

“And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days...”
― Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems

“Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
― Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe