Ruadhán McElroy > Ruadhán's Quotes

“Some of us find our lives abridged even before the paperback comes out. ”
― Berkeley Breathed

“Despite what they tell you, there are simply no moral absolutes in a complex world.”
― Berkeley Breathed

“Just the usual formality before the chaos begins. Like playing the National Anthem before a Cubs game.”
― Berkeley Breathed, The Bloom County Library, Vol. 3: 1984-1986

“The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.”
― Poppy Z. Brite

“He has 'le coeur comme un artichaud'. Eddy fumbled for her high school French. 'A heart like an artichoke?' 'Oui. He has a leaf for everyone, but makes a meal for no one.”
― Poppy Z. Brite

“If you're a freelance writer and aren't used to being ignored, neglected, and generally given short shrift, you must not have been in the business very long.


”
― Poppy Z. Brite

“Delete nothing. Move nothing. Change nothing. Learn everything.”
― Poppy Z. Brite

“Why bother? I was right all along: the second you make yourself vulnerable to someone, they start drawing blood.”
― Poppy Z. Brite

“Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.”
― Derek Jarman

“Nothing is new anymore. We're living in a post-everything society and "art" itself has become satire.”
― Ruadhán J. McElroy

“I never saw "being different" in and of itself as the point to "being Goth" -- dressing different from most others, maybe, but the point to me was to get together with people who liked the same music and clothes, or at least very similar music and clothes, and go to clubs, go to movies, go to coffee-houses and hold poetry readings and, in general, just have some good harmless fun. Did I look like a dork? Sure, but so did everybody else in the club. We weren't "being different", at least not all of us, we just were different and the point was to stop bitching about being different and just have fun.”
― Ruadhán J. McElroy

“Everything worth knowing about the 1980s I learned from obsessively reading Bloom County collections when I was nine and Derek Jarman's diaries when I was twenty.”
― Ruadhán J. McElroy

“If you sincerely desire a truly well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and "nutty." You need the balance! Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day, no matter what. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket... even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the telepathic pressure alone of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in consensus reality.”
― Ivan Stang, High Weirdness by Mail: A Directory of the Fringe-Mad Prophets, Crackpots, Kooks & True Visionaries

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

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“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

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I am not saying that you have to be a jazz fan to be a Mod. The Mod scene incorporates a wide variety of music genres, and you don’t have to like all of them to be a Mod. Considering that, you may not have to like every genre generally accepted in the Mod scene, but a basic respect for the genres that helped lay the foundation for the scene (Jazz, Soul, British Rhythm and Blues), especially their place in the scene, is something I feel should be expected of anybody in the Mod scene who wants their opinion taken seriously. That said, let’s be realistic: You may not have to like any one or two or ten specific genres of Mod music, but if you don’t like any of them, yet still fancy yourself to be a “Mod”, don’t be surprised when people in the scene don’t take you seriously at all.”
― Ruadhán J. McElroy

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby