Declan Franks > Declan's Quotes

“It’s funny how something as small as the news of a teenager being slaughtered and tossed in a ravine can be enough to lift the spirits of an entire set full of important Hollywood people.”
― Norm Macdonald, Based on a True Story

“I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises - they're like little flowers. I've always said that if you have a name for something, like 'cut' or 'bruise,' people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don't know what it is, it can be very beautiful.”
― David Lynch

“But they hushed, all at once and quite abruptly, when he stood still at center stage, his arms straight out from his shoulders, and went rigid, and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism. Nobody present had ever seen anyone stand so still and yet so strangely mobile. He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship’s horn, the locomotive’s lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moanmusic of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever.”
― Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

“Conscience is the voice of God.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916

“My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn’t live much longer.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore

“They lay listening. Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn't fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“But dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly he was given that other lifetime.”
― Raymond Carver, Short Cuts: Selected Stories

“If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoot themselves in...the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.”
― Harold Pinter, Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics

“The meaning of world is the separation of wish and fact.”
― Kurt Gödel

“The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all.”
― Kurt Gödel

“I was walking home from the theatre with Goethe this evening when we saw a small boy in a plum colored waistcoat. Youth, Goethe said, is the silky apple butter on the good brown bread of possibility”
― Harmony Korine, A Crackup at the Race Riots

“My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“We think our actions express our decisions. But in nearly all of our life, willing decides nothing. We cannot wake up or fall asleep, remember or forget our dreams, summon or banish our thoughts, by deciding to do so. When we greet someone on the street we just act, and there is no actor standing behind what we do. Our acts are end points in long sequences of unconscious responses. They arise from a structure of habits and skills that is almost infinitely complicated. Most of our life in enacted without conscious awareness. Nor can it be made conscious. No degree of self-awareness can make us self-transparent.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”
― Paul Valéry

“Prefer what intuition whispers in your ear to what you have done and redone ten times in your head.”
― Robert Bresson

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.”
― Kurt Godël

“There is a difference between a thing and talking about a thing.”
― Kurt Godël

“And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Clean Well-Lighted Place

“His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could close his eyelids. The room smoked of grief.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, These Possible Lives

“Hell is just a frame of mind.”
― Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus

“Again and again we try to escape ourselves, but we fail in our efforts, constantly run our heads into the wall because we don't want to recognize that we can't escape ourselves, except in death.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Love is God’s first word, the first thought that sailed through his mind. When he said: Let there by light! there was love. And he was well-pleased with what he had made, nor did he wish any of it unmade. And love was the world’s origin and the world’s ruler; but all its ways are filled with flowers and blood, flowers and blood.”
― Knut Hamsun, Victoria