Rob Coyner > Rob's Quotes

“Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“We are all migrants through time.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“A nation is bound not only by the real past, but the stories it tells itself: by what it remembers, and what it forgets.”
― Colin Thubron

“You must endure and not be broken-hearted.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”
― Rumi

“We understand more than we know.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“Love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.”
― Plato, The Symposium

“Please explain to me the scientific nature of the whammy.”
― Dana Scully

“from what we cannot hold the stars are made”
― W.S. Merwin

“If it no go so, it go near so. —Jamaican proverb”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“The plan is the body”
― Robert Creeley, Away

“And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“I believe in the ordinary day
that is here at this moment and is me

I do not see it going its way
but I never saw how it came to me

it extends beyond whatever I may
think I know and all that is real to me

it is the present that it bears away
where has it gone when it has gone from me

there is no place I know outside today
except for the unknown all around me

the only presence that appears to stay
everything that I call mine it lent me

even the way that I believe the day
for as long as it is here and is me”
― W.S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius

“The way I keep in touch with the world is very gingerly, because the world touches too hard.”
― Don Van Vliet

“I have built a high palace that will never disappear. No rain, no wind will destroy it.”
― Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings

“Perhaps we are hurtling our bodies towards the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love from the speeding passage of time...”
― Ada Limon

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
…'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”
― David Hume

“Omnia mutantur; nihil interit”
― Ovid

“You may see the time you wish you had worse.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“This life is not the same as your other life.”
― Carolyn Forché, In the Lateness of the World

“I feel that words are savage gods and that in the end, however well you serve them, they will eat you alive.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Savage Gods

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

“Lord Henry had not yet come in. He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting