Helen > Helen's Quotes

“On sorrow floats laughter.”
― Gunter Grass

“I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.”
― Christopher Isherwood

“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Immaturity

“A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
― Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

“When we are not sure, we are alive.”
― Graham Greene

“It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Only when I fall do I get up again.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.”
― Graham Greene

“There’s no such thing as yesterday, he thought dully. Memory is just today, happening over and over again, stamped indelibly with regret.”
― Helen Maryles Shankman

“When your heart breaks, you can actually feel it, an agonizing stab of pain in a muscle that you know for a fact is just a glorified pump. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, the ordered universe changes, the solid ground beneath your feet becomes a slippery rock. The material world that seemed so safe and solid a moment ago becomes a shifting, ghostly place of shadows and mist. Matters that seemed settled and certain a long ago come suddenly unhinged, and you begin to doubt everything you ever knew to be true.”
― Helen Maryles Shankman

“I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never by conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

“I love you. I love the way you rub the scar on the back of your hand when you're nervous. I love the way you make a sword into a living part of your body. I love the way you burn your eyes into me, as if you're seeing me fresh every time. I love the black streak in you that wants to kill the world, and the soft streak that is sorry afterward. I love the way you laugh, as if you're surprised that you can laugh at all. I love the way you kiss my breath away. I love the way you breathe and speak and smile. I love the way you take the air out of my lungs when you hold me. I love the way you make a dance out of death. I love the confusion I see in your eyes when you realize you are happy. I love every muscle and bone in your body, every twist and bend in your soul.”
― Kate Quinn, Mistress of Rome

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
― Winston Churchill

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be.”
― Thomas Ligotti

“Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere.”
― Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
― Anne Frank

“The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.”
― Philip K. Dick

“You can suck the life out of someone without ever touching a drop of their blood. --Raphael Sinclair”
― Helen Maryles Shankman, The Color of Light

“Rest in peace? Please, God, no. Haunt me, Sofia. You said you'd haunt me.”
― Helen Maryles Shankman, The Color of Light

“For decades afterwards, I punished myself with images of Sofia standing
naked in the snow, shivering, clutching a chunk of cement that a guard had told her was soap, in the worst winter Poland has ever known. But as I stared at the empty train tracks and thought of the stationmaster making the schoolyard slash across his throat, I had no idea what he was talking about. I could not have conjured up the kind of man who would be willing to design an oven that would be economically fueled by the fat of the men, women and children it was burning. I would not have believed that these same engineers would find other men willing to carry out their monstrous plans. I, too, would have dismissed it as propaganda, that one kind of human being could industriously collect and kill six million of another kind of human being. Somewhere along the line, there would have to be someone who said no.

Forgive me, Sofia. Forgive me, Isaiah. I did not know.”
― Helen Maryles Shankman, The Color of Light

“The terrible things that happen to us,” Tessa said slowly. “What we
do with them...I think that’s what makes us artists.”
― Helen Maryles Shankman, The Color of Light

“I am tempted to find reason and justice in the fact that he died as violently and indecently as he lived. But that is too ingenuous a way out. It does not explain Dimitrios; it only apologizes for him. Special sorts of conditions must exist for the creation of the special sort of criminal that he typified...all I do know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment, those conditions will obtain.”
― Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios

“If such things were not so dangerous one would laugh. But one recognizes the technique. Such propaganda always begins with words, but soon it proceeds to deeds. When there are no facts to support lies, facts must be made.”
― Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios

“Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes.”
― Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

“Reality is as thin as paper, and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.”
― Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

“There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are double, make-believe streets. One's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which the streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night.”
― Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

“Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep. The balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine.”
― Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles