Brendan Clancy > Brendan's Quotes

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.”
― E.L. Doctorow, City of God

“But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution.'

'What sort of tools?'

'More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason—or are manipulated into reasoning—that the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The Eye in the Pyramid

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.”
― William Carlos Williams

“I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

“I watched bulls bred to cows, watched mares foal, I saw life come from the egg and the multiplicative wonders of mudholes and ponds, the jell and slime of life shimmering in gravid expectation. Everywhere I looked, life sprang from something not life, insects unfolded from sacs on the surface of still waters and were instantly on prowl for their dinner, everything that came into being knew at once what to do and did it, unastonished that it was what it was, unimpressed by where it was, the great earth heaving up bloodied newborns from every pore, every cell, bearing the variousness of itself from every conceivable substance which it contained in itself, sprouting life that flew or waved in the wind or blew from the mountains or stuck to the damp black underside of rocks, or swam or suckled or bellowed or silently separated in two.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Lives of the Poets: A Novella and Six Stories

“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not a mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.”
― Washington Irving

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?”
― Margaret Atwood

“Should is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Government is the Entertainment division of the military-industrial complex.”
― Frank Zappa