Patrick Lloyd > Patrick's Quotes

“The best way to contradict him is to let him talk”
― Edward St Aubyn

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“We all go through a challenge in life because without a challenge there’d be no reason to keep going toward your future.”
― Mark Twain and M J Elliott, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“One does not escape that easily from the seduction of an effete way of life. You cannot arbitrarily say to yourself, I will now continue my life as it was before this thing, Success, happened to me. But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to - why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position to know where danger lies.”
― Tennessee Williams, Where I Live: Selected Essays

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“No one who is young is ever going to be old.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I know why I’m going—and, Tom, I know where I’m going, and I am content.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility. Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.”
― Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve

“No, they didn’t have any money, the sea was dangerous and men were lost, but it was a satisfying life in a way people today do not understand. There was a joinery of lives all worked together, smooth in places, or lumpy, but joined. The work and the living you did was the same things, not separated out like today.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“The sky a net, its mesh clogged with glowing stars.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“I try all things, I achieve what I can.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Ignorance is the parent of fear.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man’s lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what is good would, on the contrary, increase to monstrous proportions in the course of centuries. A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate. Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave. I could see the return of barbaric codes, of implacable gods, of unquestioned despotism of savage chieftains, a world broken up into enemy states and eternally prey to insecurity. Other sentinels menaced by arrows would patrol the walls of future cities; the stupid, cruel, and obscene game would go on, and the human species in growing older would doubtless add new refinements of horror. Our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else would perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“I was only the more anxious to make Jerusalem a city like the others, where several races and several beliefs could live in peace; but I was wrong to forget that in any combat between fanaticism and common sense the latter has rarely the upper hand.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“Human beings betray their worst failings when they marvel to find that a world ruler is neither foolishly indolent, presumptuous, nor cruel.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“My purpose was simply to diminish that mass of contradictions and abuses which eventually turn legal procedure into a wilderness where decent people hardly dare venture, and where bandits abound.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“Attianus had been right in his conjectures: the virgin gold of respect would be too soft without some alloy of fear.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
― William Shakespeare , Julius Caesar

“There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar