Joseph Patterson > Joseph's Quotes

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
― Franz Kafka

“We faced it and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It's gone, but we remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Nobody's perfect. Well, there was this one guy, but we killed him....”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“The Lord is not serious. In fact, it is a little hard to know just what else He is except loving. And love has to do with humor, doesn't it? For you cannot love someone unless you put up with him, can you? And you cannot put up with someone constantly unless you can laugh at him. Isn't that true? And certainly we are rediculous little animals wallowing in the fudge bowl, and God must love us all the more because we appeal to his humor.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“I'm not anyone, I'm just myself; whatever I am, I am something, and now I'm something you can't help.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Waking up begins with am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habbit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.”
― Haruki Murakami

“Who knows how to make love stay?

1. Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“A person needs new experiences. It jars something deep inside, allowing them to grow. Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”
― Duke Leto Atreides

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Today we hear a lot of songs about love, and the mention of the big love thing on the way. You know what I would do? I would buy a gun and bar my door because I would know there is a storm of hypocrisy brewing.”
― Alan Watts

“But this means you exist only for the purpose of clearing away the sand doesn't it?”
― Kōbō Abe

“The most frightening thing in the world is to discover the abnormal in that which is closest to us.”
― Kobo Abe

“Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“Being free always involves being lonely.”
― Kōbō Abe

“I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash. Horror movies, science fiction movies, movies about losers on motorcycles- this was the stuff that turned my dials up to ten.”
― Stephen King, On Writing