Benjamin > Benjamin's Quotes

“Do not hurt where holding is enough; do not wound where hurting is enough; do not maim where wounding is enough; and kill not where maiming is enough; the greatest warrior is he who does not need to kill.”
― Stephen R. Donaldson, The Illearth War

“Let's say it once and for all: Poe and Lovecraft - not to mention a Bruno Schulz or a Franz Kafka - were what the world at large would consider extremely disturbed individuals. And most people who are that disturbed are not able to create works of fiction. These and other names I could mention are people who are just on the cusp of total psychological derangement. Sometimes they cross over and fall into the province of 'outsider artists.' That's where the future development of horror fiction lies - in the next person who is almost too emotionally and psychologically damaged to live in the world but not too damaged to produce fiction.”
― Thomas Ligotti

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”
― James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion

“Seven things has Lady Lackless Keeps them underneath her black dress One a ring that’s not for wearing One a sharp word, not for swearing Right beside her husband’s candle There’s a door without a handle In a box, no lid or locks Lackless keeps her husband’s rocks There’s a secret she’s been keeping She’s been dreaming and not sleeping On a road, that’s not for traveling Lackless likes her riddle raveling.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“When he crashed into the glade among the cottonwoods he fell headlong and lay there with his cheek to the earth. And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare. He would have taken it for some boneless cognate of his heart’s dread had the child not cried.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“Look at walls splashed with a number of stains, or stones of various mixed colours. If you have to invent some scene, you can see there resemblances to a number of landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains, valleys and hills, in various ways. Also you can see various battles, and lively postures of strange figures, expressions on faces, costumes and an infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good integrated form. This happens on such walls and varicoloured stones, (which act) like the sound of bells, in whose peeling you can find every name and word that you can imagine.
Do not despise my opinion, when I remind you that it should not hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or the ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places, in which, if you consider them well, you may find really marvelous ideas. The mind of the painter is
stimulated to new discoveries, the composition of battles of animals and men, various compositions of landscapes and monstrous things, such as devils and similar things, which may bring you honor, because by indistinct things the mind is stimulated to new inventions.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)

“The last of us could be the very best of us who ever roamed the earth, the great exemplars of a humanity we used to dream of becoming before we got wise to the reality that we are just a mob always in the market for new recruits.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch it out on purpose!)”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

“The spectacle interested him, interested him deeply, though it came over him that he wasn’t particularly eager for a way of life represented by marble and gilt and feathered hats. No, what seized his innermost attention, what held him there day after day in noon revery, was the sense of a great, elaborate structure, a system of order, a well-planned machine that drew all these people to itself and carried them up and down in iron cages and arranged them in private rooms. He admired the hotel as an invention, an ingenious design, a kind of idea, like a steam boiler or a suspension bridge. But could you say that a bridge or a steam boiler was an idea? In the warm, bright lobby Martin’s thoughts would grow confused, as if he had been falling into a fantastic dream,”
― Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

“And at once he saw: deep under the earth, in darkness impenetrable, an immense dynamo was humming. Above the dynamo was an underground hive of shops, with electric lights and steam heat, and above the shops an underground park or garden with what seemed to be a theater of some kind. Above the ground a great lobby stretched away: elevator doors opened and closed, people strode in and out, bells rang, the squeak of valises mingled with the rattle of many keys and the ringing of many telephones, alcove opened into alcove as far as the eye could see. Above the lobby rose two floors of public rooms and then the private rooms began, floor after floor of rooms, higher and higher, a vertical city, a white tower, a steel flower—and always elevators rising and falling, from the cloud-piercing top to the darkness where the great dynamo hummed. Martin had less the sense of observing the building than of inhabiting it at every point: he rose and fell in the many elevators, he strolled through the parlor of an upper room and walked in the underground park or garden—and then it was as if the structure were his own body, his head piercing the clouds, his feet buried deep in the earth, and in his blood the plunge and rise of elevators.”
― Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

“That thrust was now being expressed in new forms, based on steel-frame construction, which allowed newspaper offices and insurance buildings to rise above the towering spire of Trinity Church; and Martin imagined great structures hundreds of stories high, each a city in itself, rising across the land.”
― Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

“The department store and the hotel were little cities within the city, but they were also experimental cities, cities in advance of the city, for they represented in different forms the thrust toward vertical community that seemed to Martin the great fact of the modern city. That thrust was now being expressed in new forms, based on steel-frame construction, which allowed newspaper offices and insurance buildings to rise above the towering spire of Trinity Church; and Martin imagined great structures hundreds of stories high, each a city in itself, rising across the land.”
― Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

“Here at the end of the line, here at the world’s end, the world didn’t end: iron piers stretched out over the ocean, iron towers pierced the sky, somewhere under the water a great telegraph cable longer than the longest train stretched past sunken ships and octopuses all the way to England—and Martin had the odd sensation, as he stood quietly in the lifting and falling waves, that the world, immense and extravagant, was rushing away in every direction:”
― Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

“Martin didn’t have to think it over, since the idea was as fantastic and crackbrained as the idea of joining a circus, and as he dismissed the offer with a shrug he suddenly imagined himself walking along the red-carpeted corridors of the Vanderlyn, past the high doors, looking up at the brass numbers; and for a moment he saw so vividly the half-open door, and the two feet crossed on the bed, that a confusion came over him, as if he were waking from a dream to find himself in a brown, dusky shop.”
― Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

“I stood there on the sidewalk, looking down the street, and I felt hatred for the town—not for the people in it, but for the town itself, for the impersonal geographic concept of one particular place. The town lay dusty and arrogant and smug beyond all telling and it sneered at me and I knew that I had been mistaken in not leaving it when I’d had the chance. I had tried to live with it for very love of it, but I’d been blind to try. I had known what all my friends had known, the ones who’d gone away, but I had closed my mind to that sure and certain knowledge: there was nothing left in Millville to make one stay around. It was an old town and it was dying, as old things always die.”
― Clifford D. Simak, All Flesh Is Grass

“To have committed every crime but that of being a father.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Books are the steps of the threshold. . . . All Cimmerian authors have passed it . . . Then the wordless language of the dead begins, which says the things that only the language of the dead can say. Cimmerian is the last language of the living, the language of the threshold! You come here to try to listen there, beyond. . . . Listen .”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Reading,” he says, “is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead . . .”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“It’s not for reading. It’s for making. I make things with books. I make objects. Yes, artworks: statues, pictures, whatever you want to call them. I even had a show. I fix the books with mastic, and they stay as they were. Shut, or open, or else I give them forms, I carve them, I make holes in them. A book is a good material to work with; you can make all sorts of things with it.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“The businessmen to whom, before meetings, I show the collection glance with superficial curiosity at these bizarre apparatuses. They don’t know that I have built my financial empire on the very principle of kaleidoscopes and catoptric instruments, multiplying, as if in a play of mirrors, companies without capital, enlarging credit, making disastrous deficits vanish in the dead corners of illusory perspectives. My secret, the secret of my uninterrupted financial victories in a period that has witnessed so many crises and market crashes and bankruptcies, has always been this: that I never thought directly of money, business, profits, but only of the angles of refraction established among shining surfaces variously inclined.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone’s ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person!”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“Let’s be frank: every regime, even the most authoritarian, survives in a situation of unstable equilibrium, whereby it needs to justify constantly the existence of its repressive apparatus, therefore of something to repress.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“We can prevent reading: but in the decree that forbids reading there will be still read something of the truth that we would wish never to be read.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“I tried to escape, insinuating myself with crawling movements toward the center of the spirals, where the lines slithered like serpents following the writhing of Irina’s limbs, supple and restless, in a slow dance where it is not the rhythm that counts but the knotting and loosening of serpentine lines. There are two serpents whose heads Irina grasps with her hands, and they react to her grasp, intensifying their own aptitude for rectilinear penetration, while she was insisting, on the contrary, that the maximum of controlled power should correspond to a reptile pliability bending to overtake her in impossible contortions.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“One of the things I realized was that the universe had been evolving for countless billions of years in total darkness and total silence and that the way that we imagine it is not the way that it was. In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against. And the question once again of the nature of that reality to which there was no witness. All of this until the first living creature possessed of vision agreed to imprint the universe upon its primitive and trembling sensorium and then to touch it with color and movement and memory. It made of me an overnight solipsist and to some extent I am yet.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris