Ward Howarth > Ward's Quotes

“Tell me anything.
Tell me everything.
Revoke our time apart.
Love me fierce in danger.”
― James Ellroy, White Jazz

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold”
― William Carlos Williams

“He checked his parachute and launched himself into the Sea of Sarcasm.
--Havana Red”
― Leonardo Padura

“You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.”
― Richard Price

“Before forty, you think that exhaustion is something like a long-lasting hangover. But at forty you learn all about it. Even your passions exhaust you.”
― Kevin Barry

“A man once told me that you step out of your door in the morning, and you are already in trouble. The only question is, are you on top of that trouble or not?”
― Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress

“There is always that dream of escape, but there is no place to escape to, you just run into yourself.”
― Willy Vlautin

“Look, here's a piece of advice. What you do is you think about the life you want, you think about it in your head. Make it a place where you want to be: a ranch, a beach house, a penthouse on the top of a skyscraper. It doesn't matter what it is, but a place that you can hide in. When things get rough, go there.”
― Willy Vlautin, The Motel Life

“She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

“I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

“Most addicts kill themselves by just trying to get some sleep.”
― Eve Babitz, L.A.WOMAN

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anais Nin

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Be grateful for every scar life inflicts on you. Where we’re unhurt is where we are false. Where we are wounded and healed is where our real self gets to show itself. That’s where you get to show who you really are”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead