Charlie Blecker > Charlie's Quotes

“I hope, or I could not live.”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“Truth is in things, and not in words. ”
― Herman Melville

“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier;
I have seen worse sights than this.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.”
― Eugène Ionesco, Man With Bags

“I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I've always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized "realistic" story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its "realist" style.”
― Stanley Kubrick

“I love songs about horses, railroads, land, Judgment Day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. And Mother. And God.”
― Johnny Cash

“It's a funny world, Hobbes."
"True."
"But it's not a hilarious world.…unless you like sick humour."
"The world is probably funnier to people who don't live here.”
― Bill Watterson, Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat

“Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.”
― Bill Watterson

“Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.”
― Laurie Anderson

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
― Stanley Kubrick

“It always looks darkest just before it gets totally black.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“All Americans have something lonely about them. I don't know what the reason might be, except maybe that they're all descended from immigrants.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“When you're in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who's decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.”
― eric hoffer

“Innocence is a kind of insanity”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

“It came from the woods. Most strange things do.”
― Emily Carroll, Through the Woods

“Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.”
― Werner Herzog

“A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day.”
― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay. ”
― Eric Hoffer

“I really think I shall commence chapter forty-four," he said, patting his hands together. "I shall commence, I think, with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie. Constance, my dear?"
"Yes, Uncle Julian?"
"I am going to say that my wife was a beautiful woman.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“The world doesn't make sense until you force it to.”
― Frank Miller

“There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“Truth is a well-known pathological liar. It invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock. Self-proclaimed Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it comes right out and says, "I'm a Liar," right there on the dust jacket.”
― Alan Moore

“Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.”
― Edgar Allen Poe