Dark > Dark's Quotes

“I was thinking that a life is just the history of what we give our attention to,’ said Patrick. ‘The rest is packaging.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“Sometimes, when he was lying in bed, a single word like ‘fear’ or ‘infinity’ flicked the roof off the house and sucked him into the night, past the stars that had been bent into bears and ploughs, and into a pure darkness where everything was annihilated except the feeling of annihilation. As the little capsule of his intelligence disintegrated, he went on feeling its burning edges, its fragmenting hull, and when the capsule flew apart he was the bits flying apart, and when the bits turned into atoms he was the flying apart itself, growing stronger instead of fading, like an evil energy defying the running out of everything and feeding on waste, and soon enough the whole of space was a waste-fuelled rush and there was no place in it for a human mind; but there he was, still feeling.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels

“What was the thread that held together the scattered beads of experience if not the pressure of interpretation? The meaning of life was whatever meaning one could thrust down its reluctant throat.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“experience of love is that you get excited thinking that someone can mend your broken heart, and then you get angry when you realize that they can’t. A certain economy creeps into the process and the jewelled daggers that used to pierce one’s heart are replaced by ever-blunter penknives.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“the real failure: that he couldn’t be the sort of father he wanted to be, a man who had transcended his ancestral muddle and offered his children unhaunted love. He had made it out of what he thought of as Zone One, where a parent was doomed to make his child experience what he had hated most about his life, but he was still stuck in Zone Two, where the painstaking avoidance of Zone One blinded him to fresh mistakes. In Zone Two giving was based on what the giver lacked. Nothing was more exhausting than this deficiency-driven, overcompensating zeal. He dreamt of Zone Three. He sensed that it was there, just over the hill, like the rumour of a fertile valley.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“He found her pretty in a bewildered, washed-out way, but it was her restlessness that aroused him, the quiet exasperation of a woman who longs to throw herself into something significant, but cannot find what it is.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.”
― W. H. Auden

“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
― W H Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue

“Curving back within myself I create again and again.”
― Anonymous, The Bhagavad Gita

“कालो ऽस्मि लोकक्षयकृत्प्रवृद्धो..... ( I am Time, the great destroyer of the world ~Bhagavad Gita 11.32)”
― Ved Vyasa, The Bhagavad Gita

“He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye.”
― Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, The Bhagavad Gita

“I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
― Bhagavad Gita, or Song of the Lord, The Bhagavad Gita

“The wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead. There was never a time when you and I and all the kings gathered here have not existed and nor will there be a time when we will cease to exist.”
― Anonymous, The Bhagavad Gita

“We behold what we are, and we are what we behold.”
― Ved Vyasa, The Bhagavad Gita

“The embodied soul is eternal in existence, indestructible, and infinite, only the material body is factually perishable, therefore fight O Arjuna.”
― Anonymous, The Bhagavad Gita

“we never really encounter the world; all we experience is our own nervous system.”
― Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, The Bhagavad Gita

“We are not cabin-dwellers, born to a life cramped and confined; we are meant to explore, to seek, to push the limits of our potential as human beings. The world of the senses is just a base camp: we are meant to be as much at home in consciousness as in the world of physical reality.”
― Ved Vyasa, The Bhagavad Gita

“It is Nature that causes all movement. Deluded by the ego, the fool harbors the perception that says "I did it".”
― Veda Vyasa, The Bhagavadgita or The Song Divine

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
― Aldous Huxley

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“No social stability without individual stability.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all boil down to one sentence: It is right to rebel.”
― Mao Zedong

“Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.

Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else.

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.

Was Rorschach.

Does that answer your Questions, Doctor?”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“Remember, remember the fifth of November of gunpowder treason and plot. I know of no reason why the gun powder treason should ever be forgot.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“Ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of amazement - some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”
― Mary Oliver