Gillian Prew > Gillian's Quotes

“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Americus, Book I

“To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion”
― Marcel Proust

“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”
― Samuel Beckett

“I can't go on, I'll go on.”
― Samuel Beckett, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
― Samuel Beckett

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“so many vaginas, stomachs, cocks, snouts, and flies you don't know what to do with them ... shovelsfull! ... but hearts? ... very rare! in the last five hundred million years too many cocks and gastric tubes to count ... but hearts? ... on your fingers! ...”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, North

“All thinking men are atheists.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”
― E. E. Cummings

“There is in every madman
a misunderstood genius
whose idea
shining in his head
frightened people
and for whom delirium was the only solution
to the strangulation
that life had prepared for him.”
― Antonin Artaud

“I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.”
― Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings

“I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.”
― Jimi Hendrix, The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Axis: Bold as Love

“I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?"
Death thought about it.
CATS, he said eventually. CATS ARE NICE.”
― Terry Pratchett, Sourcery

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.”
― Ezra Pound

“For darkness restores what light cannot repair.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“The beginning of genius is being scared shitless.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Church

“The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but "Can they suffer?”
― Jeremy Bentham (An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Philosophical Classics), The Principles of Morals and Legislation

“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

“To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today... starvation, cruelty - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer