Mark Maguire > Mark's Quotes

“The gods of irony never sleep.”
― Mark Wallace Maguire, Alexandria Rising

“Call them all the children of Ozymandias if you wish. They will be forgotten soon and before the tides of sand erase their names, we’ll have more like them. We are the wizards behind the curtain, Rand. The rest are mere puppets, players on a stage and all that rabble.”
― Mark Wallace Maguire, Alexandria Rising

“All was not lost when the Library at Alexandria was burned”
― Mark Wallace Maguire, Alexandria Rising

“Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.”
― Brendan Behan

“It often occurs to me that we love most what makes us miserable. In my opinion, the damned are damned because they enjoy being damned.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, Tarry Flynn

“Books have the power to create, destroy or change civilizations.”
― Zaman Ali, HUMANITY Understanding Reality and Inquiring Good

“The snow is still falling and the worst man in the world is drawn towards it like a man who is contemplating his childhood in the dancing flakes.”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.”
― Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

“See this page of paper? It’s blank,” Scull said. “That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir—this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it’s harder than fighting Lee. Why, it’s harder than fighting Napoleon. It requires unremitting attention,”
― Larry McMurtry, Comanche Moon

“I suppose she's just dying of living--that's the one infection that strikes us all down, sooner or later.”
― Larry McMurtry, Comanche Moon

“She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Expectations are resentments under construction.”
― Anne Lamott

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed