Tom Emlyn > Tom's Quotes

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

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunch-backed makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed form kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries' vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers, heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters' sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottle-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night's rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“So yo then man what's your story?”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“Lost among these entirely strange people.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“a kite is a victim you are sure of.
you love it because it pulls.”
― Leonard Cohen

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“Hunger is good discipline.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“And when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Money is sad shit”
― Richard Brautigan, The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings

“Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream.
I'm not, she said.”
― Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

“He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.”
― Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

“Messy, isn't it?”
― Richard Brautigan

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“David Foster Wallace: There’s so much beauty and profundity in all kinds of shitty pop culture all around us.”
― David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“I was abruptly recognized as nonthreatening, brusquely advised to fuck off, and off I duly and promptly fucked.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“Lust and learning,” Katherine once said. “That’s really all there is, isn’t it?”
― John Williams, Stoner

“In the University library he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, inhaling the musty odor of leather, cloth, and drying page as if it were an exotic incense.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“What does despair mean to someone who interprets that emotion as a chemical reaction in the brain?”
― Mitchell Heisman, Suicide Note

“I might be a nihilist except that I don’t believe in anything.”
― Mitchell Heisman

“I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“I have very bad posture.”
― Kurt Cobain

“I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold onto.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept