Arno > Arno's Quotes

“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

“Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption—that an alien race would be psychologically human.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

“Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“What's it going to be then, eh?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“What does it mean to be alive except to court disaster and suffering at every moment?”
― Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

“Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“Revolutionary’ discipline depends on political consciousness – on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“What we need is equality without conformity.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“There is not love of life without despair about life.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“Silence creates its own violence.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“I thought to myself: if it’s true that every person has a star in the sky, mine must be distant, dim, and absurd. Perhaps I never had a star.”
― Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl

“Devils and Nazis don’t work well together.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“In the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“Ik wist, ofschoon van alle vrees verstoken, dat die naam nooit meer helemaal uit mijn leven zou verdwijnen, zoals de apostaat wel vermoedt, dat in zijn hormonen God nooit gans afsterven kan.”
― Hubert Lampo, De komst van Joachim Stiller