Mark Matthews > Mark's Quotes

“But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“We live as we dream--alone....”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.”
― John Barth

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

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”
― Franz Kafka

“My ambition was to live like music.”
― Mary Gaitskill

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.”
― Voltaire

“The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.”
― Katherine Mansfield

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

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There are three types of people in this world; Those who Sit, those who Stand, and those who Run. I've never doubted which I am.”
― Angela White

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
― Nora Ephron

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“A scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
― Gospel of Thomas

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Readers have the right to say whatever the fuck they want about a book. Period. They have that right. If they hate the book because the MC says the word “delicious” and the reader believes it’s the Devil’s word and only evil people use it, they can shout from the rooftops “This book is shit and don’t read it” if they want. If they want to write a review entirely about how much they hate the cover, they can if they want. If they want to make their review all about how their dog Foot Foot especially loved to pee on that particular book, they can."

[Blog entry, January 9, 2012]”
― Stacia Kane

“Horror itself is a bit of a bullied genre, the antagonist being literary snobbery and public misconception. And I think good horror tackles our darkest fears, whatever they may be. It takes us into the minds of the victims, explores the threats, disseminates fear, studies how it changes us. It pulls back the curtain on the ugly underbelly of society, tears away the masks the monsters wear out in the world, shows us the potential truth of the human condition. Horror is truth, unflinching and honest. Not everybody wants to see that, but good horror ensures that it's there to be seen.”
― Kealan Patrick Burke

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King

“True! - nervous - very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings

“And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense? --now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings