Marcus > Marcus's Quotes

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
― Harry Crosby, Transit of Venus

“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”
― T.S. Eliot.

“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.”
― T.S. Eliot

“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”
― T.S. Eliot

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity”
― T.S. Eliot

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.”
― Raymond Chandler

“If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.”
― Don Marquis

“A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.”
― Don Marquis

“When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?”
― Don Marquis

“The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race. ”
― Don Marquis

“Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”
― Don Marquis

“An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe it.”
― Don Marquis, Archy and Mehitabel

“Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

“A high point in a life lived at sea level, prone to flooding.”
― Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue

“If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?”
― T.S. Eliot

“...When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occassional cheese dip.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.”
― Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust

“I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.”
― Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka's The Castle

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

“It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

“Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“I, myself, am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“I hate feelings. Why does sobriety have to come with feelings?”
― Augusten Burroughs

“your mind is like an unsafe neighborhood; don't go there alone.”
― augusten burroughs

“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
― Virginia Woolf