R.C. Mulhare > R.C.'s Quotes

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.”
― Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

“No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

“He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.

“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
― Raymond Chandler

“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”
― H. P. Lovecraft

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

“I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.”
― H. P. Lovecraft

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
― H. P. Lovercraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

“To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest..”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany

“Courage, dear heart.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.”
― George Carlin

“Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I believe that half the trouble in the world comes from people asking 'What have I achieved?' rather than 'What have I enjoyed?' I've been writing about a subject I love as long as I can remember--horses and the people associated with them, anyplace, anywhere, anytime. I couldn't be happier knowing that young people are reading my books. But even more important to me is that I've enjoyed so much the writing of them.”
― Walter Farley, The Black Stallion

“Why not dream your own wonderful sequels? When you have finished a book, it can go on in your mind, the characters doing just what you want them to do.”
― Marguerite Henry, Dear Readers and Riders

“The sky grew orange and pink, a pale ghost of the full moon appeared above Salem, waiting to glow brilliant in the velvet black hiding just beyond the twilight.”
― Amber Newberry, One Night in Salem

“Mary Poppins is not a fairy-tale."
"She's even better!" said Alfred loyally. "She's a fairy-tale come true.”
― P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins Opens the Door

“People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Motto"

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a noble side.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children

“I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”
― Shannon Hale

“I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.”
― Franz Kafka

“I don't want to earn my living, I want to live.”
― Oscar Wilde

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“There are two kinds of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill people: psychopaths and mystery writers.”
― Richard Castle

“How little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History