Brian Kenny > Brian's Quotes

“Past is dead
Future is uncertain;
Present is all you have,
So eat, drink and live merry.”
― Albert Einstein

“Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.”
― Albert Einstein

“In a time of destruction, create something.”
― Maxine Hong Kingston

“It is the very reason-for-being of language and grammar that I
unhinge.”
― Antonin Artaud

“That which is possible is inevitable.”
― William Carlos Williams

“Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Music I heard with you was more than music. And bread I broke with you was more than bread.”
― Conrad Aiken

“In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.”
― John Banville

“...don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience...”
― Louise Erdrich

“Everybody must seem crazy if you see deep enough into their minds.”
― William March, The Looking-Glass

“The original Gothic horror tales focused on personalities deformed through loneliness. Ghouls, vampires, werewolves: all made, not born. But the isolation? Are even such as these ever truly alone? Perhaps the psyche has always been more complex than that, desire eternally more potent than terror. Surely, none prowl entirely in solitude.”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“Wonderful or supernatural events are not so uncommon, rather they are irregular in their incidence. Thus there may be not one marvel to speak of in a century, and then often enough comes a plentiful crop of them; monsters of all sorts swarm suddenly upon the earth, comets blaze in the sky, eclipses frighten nature, meteors fall in rain, while mermaids and sirens beguile, and sea serpents engulf every passing ship, and terrible cataclysms beset humanity.”
― David Garnett, Lady into Fox

“Stupid. Shortsighted. A man born with a sense for raw opportunity where his soul should have been. Miller’s”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“The good news is I peed before going to sleep.”
― John Scalzi, The Life of the Mind

“We are our own dragons and our own heroes. We must rescue ourselves from ourselves.”
― Peter S. Beagle

“We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“I need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I couldn't exist in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels are terrible marvels. Even if they frighten me to consider them.”
― Caitlin R. Kiernan

“I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.”
― Gore Vidal

“Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“When one opens a book, one should also open one's mind.”
― Adriano Bulla

“Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.

Do not take away the rose,
the lance flower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in joy,
the sudden wave
of silver born in you.

My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.

My love, in the darkest
hour your laughter
opens, and if suddenly
you see my blood staining
the stones of the street,
laugh, because your laughter
will be for my hands
like a fresh sword.

Next to the sea in the autumn,
your laughter must raise
its foamy cascade,
and in the spring, love,
I want your laughter like
the flower I was waiting for,
the blue flower, the rose
of my echoing country.

Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
fool who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter. ”
― Pablo Neruda

“No moral to this story, you will be saying, and I am afraid it is true.”
― Joan Aiken

“Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think. ”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“I cannot live without books.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.”
― Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose

“No daring is fatal. The whole logic of the universe is contained in daring, in creating from the flimsiest, slenderest support.”
― René Crevel

“You can’t negate the ingrained imagination of a whole culture.”
― Thomas Tryon, Harvest Home

“Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

“All religions are based on obsolete terminology.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire