Mitch > Mitch's Quotes

“Certain experiences you can't survive, and afterward you don't fully exist, even if you failed to die.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“When it worked, reading could take away the burden of time.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“We come here to tell stories so that we can manage the past without being swallowed by it.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“I've found that all weak people share a basic obsession - they fixate on the idea of satisfaction. Anywhere you go men and women are like crows drawn by shiny objects. For some folks, the shiny objects are other people, and you'd be better off developing a drug habit.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“Some people. Something happens to them. Usually when they're young. And they never get any better.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“You’re here because it’s somewhere. Dogs pant in the streets. Beer won’t stay cold. The last new song you liked came out a long, long time ago, and the radio never plays it anymore.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“I knew the past wasn't real. It was only an idea, and the thing I'd wanted to touch, to brush against, the feeling I couldn't name - it just didn't exist. It was only an idea, too.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“There’s no getting out alive, but you hope to avoid a deadline.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“The past isn't real.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“What I remembered about the man then was how helpless he'd seemed, and how you could tell that helplessness had made him cruel.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“I remember a buddy of mine once telling me that every woman you loved was a mother and sister you didn't have, at once, and that what you were always really looking for was the female part of yourself, your female animal or something. This guy could get away with saying something like that because he was a junkie and read books.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“I suppose you have to be very careful how you use your memories.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“You’re born and forty years later you hobble out a bar, startled by your own aches. Nobody knows you. You steer down lightless highways, and you invent a destination because movement is key. So you head toward the last thing you have left to lose, with no real idea what you’re going to do with it.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“Still, there was a bored sadness to her. And a resignation I’d seen on faces my whole life—people giving up, crossing over to that place without struggle—and I wanted to alter that.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“Clarity, I think, is the chief thing. Find a road and walk it.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Between Here and the Yellow Sea

“So I was wrong when I told Rocky you could choose what you feel. It's not true. It's not even true that you can choose when you'll feel. All that happens is that the past clots like a cataract or scab, a scab of memory over your eyes. And one day the light breaks through.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“You look less suspicious when you're willing to meet people.”
― Nic Pizzolatto

“In this climate all things seek shade, and so a basic quality of the Deep South is that everything here is partially hidden.”
― Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

“Back then it felt like life was not just one thing; it could be other things. Then one day it felt like the exact opposite; life was one thing and one thing only, a wait.”
― Nic Pizzolatto

“There is always something left to love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Cease, cows, life is short.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West