B.P. Gregory > B.P.'s Quotes

“One single supporter remained faithful to him: an old paralytic, Lord Albermarle. The noble lord, confined to his armchair, would have given his whole fortune to be able to travel around the world, in ten years even; and he bet four thousand pounds on Phileas Fogg.”
― Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days

“The only things that moved in the neighbourhood were bits and bobs of bafflingly pointless machinery, whittling the hours busily doing nothing. Waiting to be freed from flesh. It was an oppressive reality come home to roost. This house here contained dead people. And that one, and that one there. The same all the way down the block, horrible, inexplicable, and so quiet.”
― B.P. Gregory, Something for Everything

“For the truth is ... that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness. They desert the fallen.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“The officer sat with his long, fine hands lying on the table, perfectly still, and all his blood seemed to be corroding.
- The Prussian Officer”
― D H Lawrence

“In the months since Challenger, Baedecker had found it hard to believe that the country had ever flown so frequently and competently into space. The long hiatus of earthbound doubt in which nothing flew had become the normal state of things to Baedecker, mixing in his own mind with a dreary sense of heaviness, of entropy and gravity triumphant.”
― Dan Simmons, Phases Of Gravity

“Hell was a living place inside every membrane of flesh that temporarily passed itself off as human.”
― Adam Nevill, Apartment 16

“There is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or a woman for their world. For the world of their center where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.

The love of the diver for his world of wavering light. His world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast. Born as a plunger into the deeps he is at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every colored sponge. As he holds himself to the ocean's faery floor, one hand clasped to a bedded whale's rib, he is complete and infinite. Pulse, power and universe sway in his body. He is in love.

The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great colored surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry on his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes' handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in Love.

The rich soil crumbles through the yeoman's fingers. As the pearl diver murmurs, 'I am home' as he moves dimly in strange water-lights, and as the painter mutters, 'I am me' on his lone raft of floorboards, so the slow landsman on his acre'd marl - says with dark Fuchsia on her twisting staircase, 'I am home.”
― Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

“By then Geoffrey's threadbare soul had been left far behind standing by the side of the highway. Did he feel anything anymore? Warm? Cold? Watching after them, mouth open as if to call out; did he wish at the last moment to have done life differently?”
― B.P. Gregory, Automatons

“The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.”
― Colin Wilson

“What is the true story of Fantine? It is the story of society's purchase of a slave. A slave purchased from poverty, hunger, cold, loneliness, defencelessness, destitution. A squalid bargain: a human soul for a hunk of bread. Poverty offers and society accepts.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“The unfortunate Elizabeth Bathori was said to bathe in the blood of young girls in order to preserve her youth and beauty. Apparently more than 600 maidens went down the drain before anyone noticed something amiss at the castle. How very inobservant the neighbors must have been.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“You get started on something and you go where it takes you and you set aside other things because you don't have any choice. Because if you didn't set them aside you would never be able to go on. And then if you're lucky enough you get back to where you started and you realize your mistake. You realize how difficult it is to keep everything in your heart at the same time. How impossible. You can only keep so much and still go on. You come back for the rest if you're lucky enough.”
― Sam Winston

“No longer was she merely the dancing-girl who extorts a cry of lust and concupiscence from an old man by the lascivious contortions of her body; who breaks the will, masters the mind of a King by the spectacle of her quivering bosoms, heaving belly and tossing thighs; she was now revealed in a sense as the symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her muscles, - a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

“Doctors possessed true power. They could salvage the unsalvageable; they could extend life and raise the level of comfort for those in their final days.”
― Glen Krisch, The Nightmare Within

“Does the universe hate us? How many pitfalls lie ahead, waiting to shred our conceited molecule-clusters back into unthinking dust? Shall we count them?”
― David Brin, Existence

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke

“Men have become the tools of their tools. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.”
― E.M. Forster

“Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?”
― Stephen King

“He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a hardness, a trembling and a hot trembling, the two halves grinding one upon the other”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“In the hour before a thunderstorm, the color of the forest deepens: the pine needles take on a dense vibrant greenness they possess at no other time, the slender trunks go black, and the leaden sky above sinks lower by the minute.”
― Michael McDowell, Cold Moon Over Babylon

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“A man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it, nobody else really cares.--Louis Auchincloss”
― Louis Auchincloss

“It were as though the building’s kilometres of clanky old ductwork connected up to an asthmatic giant with poor oral hygiene, hidden away somewhere in the basement.”
― B.P. Gregory, Outermen

“What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

“But that's how it felt, pathetic or no. In a life entirely lacking in romance, that one moment of beauty smote me. I almost brayed a laugh. I'd finally fallen in love, and it was with the entire world.”
― B.P. Gregory, Outermen