Paul Cleeman > Paul's Quotes

“Out in the fjord I dragged myself up at once, wet with fever and exhaustion, and gazed landwards, and bade farewell for the present to the town – to Christiania, where the windows gleamed so brightly in all the homes.”
― Knut Hamsun

“To say she is only a woman is to say a violin is a piece of wood with strings, and Dante is mere ink printed on paper.”
― Bruce Crown, Forlorn Passions

“It was simpler just to keep things simple.”
― Bruce Crown, Forlorn Passions

“We enter this universe alone in search of microscopic beauty—and while we love, or are loved by others—we leave this world completely alone, having only found infinite sorrow. Despite there being so many of us, each of us tragically realizes that everyone is on a solitary journey. No one else can see what we see, hear what we hear, feel, what we feel. All we have of each other are glimpses of moments, whispers of experiences, memories of the past we wish we could make eternal, but in the end, we become a faint memory in the minds of a few good people.”
― Bruce Crown, Chronic Passions

“Bourbon, Kentucky bourbon especially, is like Dante’s Inferno in a glass, fire walks down your throat, lungs, and heart and everything in between with an unpleasant after-taste. We got along just fine.”
― Bruce Crown, Forlorn Passions

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“To die, it's easy. But you have to struggle for life.”
― Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History

“There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight”
― Ezra Pound

“Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep—it can't be done abruptly.”
― Colm Tóibín

“The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.”
― Richard Wright

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.”
― John Cheever

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”
― Alexander Pope

“Trust me. What a phrase. Is it a phrase or an idiom? I was never a wordsmith and I was too far along in life to even attempt to tackle a problem as complicated as words. Do writers struggle as much with words as a painter does with his paint and his brush?

“Okay,” it is impossible not to trust a beautiful woman. Even macho noir anti-heroes who talk about staying out of trouble and doin’ nothin’ for nobody always get sucked into intricate snares set for them by beautiful women… I would not be an exception.”
― Bruce Crown, How Dim the Promised Land

“The sun tried to shine through the clouds but its light was dimmed even in us; high noon approached. I looked outside through the tinted windows at the people promenading down Madison. Couples held hands, bankers squeezed through crowds of window shoppers late for their daily thieving but all of them, even the poor, seemed content with existence, some even seemed happy. Nearly everyone’s outer shell was delicate and gracious that at the end of it all, on the border of nonexistence, each and everyone was happy to be alive. Everyone carried their heads with a radiance past the space they occupied and glided through time like flamenco dancers in a studio as big as the planet. Everyone wore masks that hid their sorrow (either that or they were sincerely happy) or wore armor that lightened the burden on their shoulders. Worst of all, I could not detect ever a flicker of thought; brains mired behind viral images and videos of people making even greater fools of themselves than they already were. And as the greatest fool of them all, I walked among them, never having learned to don the mask of happiness.”
― Bruce Crown, How Dim the Promised Land

“The lighter something is, the easier it is to darken it.”
― Bruce Crown, How Dim the Promised Land

“Artists hide their identities in the brushstrokes of their paintings, the verses in their cantos, and the sentences in their novels. The true face of an artist is never on his face and this is what he prefers. Others misunderstand this displaced melancholy with an absence of melancholy.”
― Bruce Crown, How Dim the Promised Land

“I checked my words carefully. Words more powerful than atom bombs and more cutting than AK-47s. People are fragile and words, not bullets will break them, and once they break every part of them spills out. Their soul, spirit, identity, ugliness, and their beauty. It’s all there, right in front of you if you know where to look. Most people see the ugly and I didn't want to become that. I thought I looked for beauty but then wondered why I often say such ugly things.”
― Bruce Crown, How Dim the Promised Land

“A successful actor is praised for never giving up his dreams to become someone else for a living but to dream to be an unmasked artist is a mortal sin in a consumerist society. Artists don't consume; they create things that can’t be consumed with riches. You consume art by seeing, by listening, by feeling, never by buying.”
― Bruce Crown, How Dim the Promised Land

“I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert.”
― Bruce Crown, How Dim the Promised Land

“Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.”
― Anthony Burgess

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

“The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer