Joseph Hirsch > Joseph's Quotes

“Although I had managed to escape from the goose-coop, I now realized the full extent of my misfortune, for I had shitted my trousers and did not know what to do about it.”
― Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus

“The ruin of his hopes leaves the steadfast man undismayed.”
― Ernst Jünger

“I would be perfectly willing if a publisher came up to me and said, "I need a novel about underwater Nazi cheerleaders and it has to be 309 pages long and I need fourteen chapters and a prologue.”
― Michael McDowell

“That was the great misconception about men: because they dealt with money, because they could hire someone on and later fire him, because they alone filled state assemblies and were elected congressional representatives, everyone thought they had power. Yet all the hiring and firing, the land deals and the lumber contracts, the complicated process for putting through a constitutional amendment-these were only bluster. They were blinds to disguise the fact of men's real powerlessness in life. Men controlled the legislatures, but when it came down to it, they didn't control themselves. Men had failed to study their own minds sufficiently, and because of this failure they were at the mercy of fleeting passions; men, much more than women, were moved by petty jealousies and the desire for petty revenges. Because they enjoyed their enormous but superficial power, men had never been forced to know themselves the way that women, in their adversity and superficial subservience, had been forced to learn about the workings of their brains and their emotions.”
― Michael McDowell, The Flood

“You didn't like it? Well, my next one will be even better!”
― Ed Wood

“Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change.”
― marquis de sade

“Today only the person who no longer believes in a happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees

“There's no end to the absurd things people will do trying to make life mean something.”
― William Wharton, Birdy

“The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.”
― Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty

“Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,
And one arm bent across your sullen cold
Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,
Deep-shadow'd from the candle's guttering gold;
And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;
Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head....
You are too young to fall asleep for ever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.”
― Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems

“...I will exile my thoughts if they think of you again, and I will rip my lips out if they say your name once more. Now if you do exist, I will tell you my final word in life or in death, I tell you goodbye.”
― Knut Hamsun, Hunger

“It's peculiar to me,' she said, 'that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying. Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant ways to end it? There must be a hell of a lot of people in the world like me--who want to die but haven't got the guts.”
― Horace McCoy

“The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.”
― Siegfried Sassoon

“My dear, it is a great strength to have faced the worst and to have *felt* it a feature of beauty. Nothing ever after can shake one.”
― Olaf Stapledon, Odd John

“But hurry, let's entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed.”
― Federico Garcia Lorca

“My arms have mutinied against me — brutes!
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats,
My back's been stiff for hours, damned hours.
Death never gives his squad a Stand-at-ease.”
― Wilfred Owen

“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”
― Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey

“The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.”
― John Derbyshire, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism

“The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.”
― Roger Scruton

“Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
― Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

“A friend asks if I know the difference between a saint and a martyr: A saint is someone who radiates goodness and bears no faults. A martyr is someone who lives with a saint. ”
― Michael Novak

“I've often lost myself,
in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake”
― Federico García-Lorca

“I know there is no straight road
No straight road in this world
Only a giant labyrinth
Of intersecting crossroads”
― Federico García Lorca

“Nothing is always absolutely so”
― Theodore Sturgeon

“I am the immense shadow of my tears”
― Federico Garcia Lorca

“As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.”
― Federico García Lorca

“It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it — in other words, by becoming civilized — that men become fully human.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“We're all curious about what might hurt us.”
― Federico García Lorca

“The night below. We two. Crystal of pain.
You wept over great distances.
My ache was a clutch of agonies
over your sickly heart of sand.”
― Federico García Lorca, Selected Poems