Patrick Pottorff > Patrick's Quotes

“What struck me on the beach and it struck me indeed, so that I staggered as at a blow—was that if the Eternal Principle had rested in that curved thorn I had carried about my neck across so many leagues, and if it now rested in the new thorn (perhaps the same thorn) I had only now put there, then it might rest in anything, and in fact probably did rest in everything, in every thorn on every bush, in every drop of water in the sea. The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were sacred Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“That was the way life was, the way death was. A man lived as long as you hated him and died on you as soon as you began to like him.”
― Gene Wolfe, Caldé of the Long Sun

“People don't want other people to be people.”
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw

“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.”
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw

“Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine