Jon > Jon's Quotes

“When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.”
― Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

“Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was but that I was, forgot to be.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“Habit is a great deadener.”
― Samuel Beckett

“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
― Samuel Beckett

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“My mistakes are my life.”
― Samuel Beckett

“People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.
-- Circular Letter to My Friends in Italy”
― Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin

“When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People's Stick.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Netochka Nezvanova

“Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and now”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing