Kevin Adkisson > Kevin's Quotes

“You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.”
― Anton Chekhov

“We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.”
― Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“...and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.”
― Anton Chekhov, Short Stories by Anton Chekhov: About Truth, Freedom, Happiness, and Love

“If ever my life can be of any use to you, come and claim it.”
― Anton Chekhov

“I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life.”
― Anton Chekhov

“If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.”
― Anton Chekhov

“I feel like a donkey, with a stick in my mouth and a carrot up my ass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble."

(The Mill)”
― Anton Chekhov, The Portable Chekhov

“MEDVIEDENKO
Why do you always wear mourning?

MASHA
I dress in black to match my life. I am unhappy.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against.”
― chuck palahniuk

“These people you used to see every day, friends or acquaintances, after a while they become as distant as any stranger, people you suddenly recall late at night--you remember something they said or something silly that someone once did. For a few moments they completely occupy your mind; then you forget them again.”
― Stephen Dobyns, Eating Naked

“Let's say someone has experienced a violent trauma or betrayal: a child has been raped by a parent or has witnessed the destruction of someone he loves or has been so traumatized by the possibility of beatings and punishments that he's afraid to act. If the trauma is great enough, that person's life may become frozen, emotionally frozen even though he still gets up in the morning, is busy all day, and goes to bed at night. But there's this empty space that begins to fill with rage, rage toward everyone - the perpetrator, the people in the world who haven't suffered, even toward himself. (174)”
― Stephen Dobyns, Boy in the Water

“It was as if pain were a room he had entered and the door had been locked behind him.”
― Stephen Dobyns, Eating Naked

“There are many reasons for violence. This is just something that sometimes happens. We'd see it in treatment centers - the child who'd suffered something awful. Even in the best recovery there'd be a fear that everything would fall apart and they'd become victims again. And their final loyalty was to themselves. They couldn't be forced. They preferred to wreck everything, preferred self-destruction to surrender. (175)”
― Stephen Dobyns, Boy in the Water

“Most women are more into real estate than sex. They want to own you.”
― Stephen Dobyns, Eating Naked

“Actions have consequences. Ignorance about the nature of those actions does not free a person from responsibility for the consequences. (28)”
― Stephen Dobyns, The Church of Dead Girls

“They are asleep. This is the condition they prefer. They are afraid of the world and sleep is a way of dealing with their fear. Someday they will wake. Perhaps something frightful will happen. Indeed, there is no better invitation to the frightful than ignorance - that is, sleep. (29)”
― Stephen Dobyns, The Church of Dead Girls

“Each thing I do, I rush through so I can do something else. In such a way do the days pass---a blend of stock car racing and the never ending building of a gothic cathedral. Through the windows of my speeding car I see all that I love falling away: books unread, jokes untold, landscapes unvisited...”
― Stephen Dobyns

“One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.”
― Stephen Dobyns, Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry

“He thinks of that ocean house and wishes he were back in his former life or that one could take one moment and remain inside it like an egg inside its shell, instead of constantly being hurried into the future by good luck or bad.”
― Stephen Dobyns, Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992

“Adolescence is a dreadful period. We tend to notice those youngsters who misbehave and call attention to themselves, but there are others, equally miserable, who receive no help simply because they are silent. (41)”
― Stephen Dobyns, The Church of Dead Girls

“If he could not find beauty, nothing else would be worth finding.”
― Stephen Dobyns

“It's pain that changes our lives.”
― Steve Martin, Shopgirl

“...it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.”
― Steve Martin, Shopgirl

“I would assign every lie a color: yellow when they were innocent, pale blue when they sailed over you like the sky, red because I knew they drew blood. And then there was the black lie. That's the worst of all. A black lie was when I told you the truth. ”
― Steve Martin

“She tried to get even with him through psychological warfare but couldn't, because he didn't care.”
― Steve Martin, Shopgirl

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

“Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.”
― Ezra Pound

“No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.”
― Ezra Pound