Dev Jones > Dev's Quotes

“The stars are in blossom, the moon is in flower,
And bright are the windows of Night in her tower.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“I noticed something: if I put a theme park in a story, my prose improved.”
― George Saunders, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

“And who shall calculate the immense influence upon social life--upon arts--upon commerce--upon literature--which will be the immediate result of the great principles of electro-magnetics!”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Man That Was Used Up: An Edgar Allan Poe Short Story

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“Yes, he had heard it all his life, but it was only now that his ears were opened to this sound that came from darkness, that could only come from darkness, that yet bore such sure witness to the glory of the light. And now in his moaning, and so far from any help, he heard it in himself--it rose from his bleeding, his cracked-open heart. It was a sound of rage and weeping which filled the grave, rage and weeping from time set free, but bound now in eternity; rage that had no language, weeping with no voice--which yet spoke now, to John's startled soul, of boundless melancholy, of the bitterest patience, and the longest night; of the deepest water, the strongest chains, the most cruel lash; of humility most wretched, the dungeon most absolute, of love's bed defiled, and birth dishonored, and most bloody, unspeakable, sudden death. Yes, the darkness hummed with murder: the body in the water, the body in the fire, the body on the tree. John looked down the line of these armies of darkness, army upon army, and his soul whispered: Who are these? Who are they? And wondered: Where shall I go?”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“Before you descend into the Underworld, you must go to Santa Monica.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning. ”
― Louis L'Amour

“If I'd learnt one thing from travelling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don't talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.”
― Alex Garland, The Beach

“Tourists went on holidays while travellers did something else. They travelled.”
― Alex Garland, The Beach

“Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed.”
― Alex Garland, The Beach

“Though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley”
― Alex Garland

“Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up.”
― George Saunders

“In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe.”
― George Saunders

“That's what a book is: a failed attempt that, its failure notwithstanding, is sincere and hard-worked and expunged of as much falseness as he could manage, given his limited abilities, and has thus been imbued with a sort of purity.”
― George Saunders, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
― Hippocrates

“Walking is man's best medicine. ”
― Hippocrates

“The life so short, the craft so long to learn.”
― Hippocrates

“It is far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has.”
― Hippocrates

“Ars longa,
vita brevis,
occasio praeceps,
experimentum periculosum,
iudicium difficile.

Life is short,
[the] art long,
opportunity fleeting,
experiment dangerous,
judgment difficult.”
― Hippocrates

“The natural healing force within each of us is the greatest force in getting well.”
― Hippocrates

“All disease begins in the gut.”
― Hippocrates

“Nobody can build the bridge for you to walk across the river of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would carry you across this river; but only at the cost of yourself; you would pawn yourself and lose. There is in the world only one way, on which nobody can go, except you: where does it lead? Do not ask, go along with it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream

“We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.”
― Euripides

“The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgement go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. But the moment the patient begins to assimilate contents that were previously unconscious, its danger diminishes. The dissociation of personality, the anxious division of the day-time and the night-time sides of the psyche, cease with progressive assimilation.”
― C.G. Jung, The Essential Jung: Selected Writings