Adam > Adam's Quotes

“I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese.”
― Charles Fort, The Fortean Collection: The Book of The Damned, New Lands, LO!, Wild Talents, The Outcast Manufacturers

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“The infallible teacher is still in the forest primeval, throwing seeds to the white blackbirds”
― Ambrose Bierce

“If war is the test of reality, then all poetry is unreal; but in that case unreality is a virtue.”
― Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats

“But my soul,
From sight and sense of the polluting woe
Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer
Hell's freedom to the servitude of heaven.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The mind of no man is a unit, but is a community of mental states that influence one another.”
― Charles Fort, Wild Talents

“There is a continuity of all things that make classifications fictions. But all human knowledge depends upon arrangements. Then all books--scientific, theological, philosophical--are only literary.”
― Charles Fort, Wild Talents

“I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either.”
― Charles Fort, Wild Talents

“I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere, and wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein [Original 1818 Text]

“Oh! What a miserable night I passed! The cold stars shone in mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me; now and then the sweet voice of a bird burst forth amidst the universal stillness. All, save I, were at rest or in enjoyment; I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me, and finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“yet a place
There is upon some distant mountain side
Whence all doth seem to be at rest and lie
As but a glimmer on the plain below.”
― Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

“Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“Theology does not thrive in the world of action and reaction, change: it grows on calm, like the scum on a stagnant pool. And it flourishes, it prospers, on decline. Only in a world where everything is patently being lost can a priest stir men's hearts as a poet would by maintaining that nothing is in vain.”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“Imagination, of course, can open any door—turn the key and let terror walk right in.”
― Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

“On the one hand, he beheld a vision of social life in is most charming and refined forms, of quick-pulsed youth, of fair, impassioned faces invested with all the charm of poetry, framed in a marvelous setting of luxury or art; and, on the other hand, he saw a somber picture of degradation, in which passion was extinct and nothing was left but the cords and pulleys and bare mechanism.”
― Honre de Balzac

“Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The two testaments are interesting, each in its own way. The old one gives us a picture of these people's deity as he was before he got religion, the other one gives us a picture of him as he appeared afterward.”
― Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings

“Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain; a dream that was a nightmare-confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses, interspersed with long-drawn miseries, griefs, perils, horrors, disappointments, defeats,humiliations, and despairs--the heaviest curse devisable by divine ingenuity; but death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man's best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.”
― Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings

“Thus always does history, whether or marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation

“When the tongue or the pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted.”
― Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

“That's one of the things about the Depression. There was more camaraderie than there is now. Even more comradeship than the Commies could even dream about. That was one of the feelings that America lost. People had different ideas, they disagreed with one another. But there was a fine feeling among them. You were in trouble...damn it, if they could help ya, they would help ya.”
― Jim Sheridan

“Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.”
― Albert Camus

“Sin is geographical.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The pots jingled, quarrels arose, and broken mugs occasioned a destruction of rags.”
― Victor Hugo

“He had an old Ford with no door, but if you held on, there was a door. When he would take me out in the car, I would be the one that held the door on. It was that kind of Ford.”
― Phyllis Lorimer

“At sixteen I began to think of adopting a profession, and successively tried my hand at everything. I turned soldier but was not brave enough; I became a monk but was not devout enough, and besides, I could not drink hard enough. In despair, I apprenticed myself to a carpenter, but was not strong enough. I had a much greater fancy to be a school-master. True, I had not learned to read; but what of that? After some time I discovered that, owing to some deficiency or other, I was fit for nothing, and therefore set up for a poet. This is a profession to which a man who is a vagabond may always betake himself, and it is better than to thieve, as some young rogues of my acquaintance advised me to do.”
― Victor Hugo

“Mournfully and low the man of God began his eulogy of the dead, and his doleful voice, mingled with the sobbing that it was its purpose to stimulate and sustain, rose and fell, seemed to come and go, like the sound of a sullen sea.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“He was fond of the tavern, and felt comfortable only among coarse language, military gallantries, easy beauties, and easy conquests.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“Further, there is no trustworthy standard by which we can separate the "real" from the "unreal" aspects of phenomena. Such standards as exist are conventional: and correspond to convenience, not to truth. It is no argument to say that most men see the world in much the same way, and that this "way" is the true standard of reality: though for practical purposes we have agreed that sanity consists in sharing the hallucinations of our neighbours.”
― Underhill Evelyn, Mysticism, a study in the nature and development of man's spiritual consciousness - Scholar's Choice Edition

“How many fond fools serve mad jealousy!”
― William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors