Pathetic Fallacy Quotes

“In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The Chorus Line: The Birth of Telemachus, An Idyll

Nine months he sailed the wine-red seas of his mother's blood
Out of the cave of dreaded Night, of sleep,
Of troubling dreams he sailed
In his frail dark boat, the boat of himself,
Through the dangerous ocean of his vast mother he sailed
From the distant cave where the threads of men's lives are spun,
Then measured, and then cut short
By the Three Fatal Sisters, intent on their gruesome handcrafts,
And the lives of women also are twisted into the strand.

And we, the twelve who were later to die by his hand
At his father's relentless command,
Sailed as well, in the dark frail boats of ourselves
Through the turbulent seas of our swollen and sore-footed mothers
Who were not royal queens, but a motley and piebald collection,
Bought, traded, captured, kidnapped from serfs and strangers.

After the nine-month voyage we came to shore,
Beached at the same time as he was, struck by the hostile air,
Infants when he was an infant, wailing just as he wailed,
Helpless as he was helpless, but ten times more helpless as well,
For his birth was longed-for and feasted, as our births were not.
His mother presented a princeling. Our various mothers
Spawned merely, lambed, farrowed, littered,
Foaled, whelped and kittened, brooded, hatched out their clutch.
We were animal young, to be disposed of at will,
Sold, drowned in the well, traded, used, discarded when bloomless.
He was fathered; we simply appeared,
Like the crocus, the rose, the sparrows endangered in mud.

Our lives were twisted in his life; we also were children
When he was a child,
We were his pets and his toythings, mock sisters, his tiny companions.
We grew as he grew, laughed also, ran as he ran,
Though sandier, hungrier, sun-speckled, most days meatless.
He saw us as rightfully his, for whatever purpose
He chose, to tend him and feed him, to wash him, amuse him,
Rock him to sleep in the dangerous boats of ourselves.

We did not know as we played with him there in the sand
On the beach of our rocky goat-island, close by the harbour,
That he was foredoomed to swell to our cold-eyed teenaged killer.
If we had known that, would we have drowned him back then?
Young children are ruthless and selfish: everyone wants to live.

Twelve against one, he wouldn't have stood a chance.
Would we? In only a minute, when nobody else was looking?
Pushed his still-innocent child's head under the water
With our own still-innocent childish nursemaid hands,
And blamed it on waves. Would we have had it in us?
Ask the Three Sisters, spinning their blood-red mazes,
Tangling the lives of men and women together.
Only they know how events might then have had altered.
Only they know our hearts.
From us you will get no answer.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think.”
― Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction

“Then the creatures of the high air answered to the battle, foretelling the destruction that would be done that day; and the sea chattered of the losses, and the waves gave heavy shouts keening them, and the water-beasts roared to one another, and the rough hills creaked with the danger of the battle, and the woods trembled mourning the heroes, and the grey stones cried out at their deeds, and the wind sobbed telling them, and the earth shook, foretelling the slaughter; and the cries of the grey armies put a cloak over the sun, and the clouds were dark; and the hounds and the whelps and the crows, and the witches of the valley, and the powers of the air, and the wolves of the forests, howled from every quarter and on every side of the armies, urging them against one another.”
― Augusta Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men: The Story of the Tuatha De Danaan and the Fianna of Ireland

“Her lips trembled, and so did his. It was never known which lips were the first to move towards the other lips; but they kissed tremblingly, and then they moved apart.
The rain was dashing against the window-panes as if an angry spirit were within it, and behind it was the great swoop of the wind; it was one of those moments in which both the busy and the idle pause with a certain awe.”
― George Eliot

“When I get up early in the morning, I find them [the moths] clinging to the wall, motionless. I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony, until a draft of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner.”
― W.G. Sebald

“Pay attention and you will see - absolute pathetic fallacy is a gift, too.”
― Azra Gregor

“And the moon is only the moon. But they’re not empty things you know. The past is still in them. The force of events long gone, it lingers. These heavenly bodies and earthly forms, what are they but expressions of matters unfinished? …Mebbe lunatics are men who’ve remembered they’re just men, not angels.”
― Tim Winton, The Shepherd's Hut

“And then, suddenly, when the sun is beginning to warm my face, I'm there. In the zone where everything is perfect, and I'm drawing. Fingers, hand and charcoal pencil, even thought, are one and what I am, what I see, or part of it, is skimming across the page, darker here, lighter on the left, a smudging—deliberate—and feathering with spit. While inside, the crimson glow is burning, that bubble I carry within me where I store everything that happens, good or bad, where I can think about it when I'm alone, at night or on the street, waiting for the chance for cash and an easy screw.
As the glow burns, it travels through my limbs, blood and bone, and into my head where something explodes like an electric shock, so I’m shivering, retching even as my hand still moves over paper, tasting vomit in my mouth but refusing to let it go, swallowing down the bitterness. And still I draw, sweat sticky on my forehead and under my arms, but the only part of me touching what I’m doing is my hand with its instrument for line and block and shadow. Nothing can harm me now.”
― Anne Brooke, A Dangerous Man

“The tides had a certain personality in the dusk that they did not have during the day. The waters past that stage where one would call them frolicsome and instead became malicious, and active in wanting harm.”
― Claire McKenna, Monstrous Heart

“The tides had a certain personality in the dusk that they did not have during the day. The waters passed that stage where one would call them frolicsome and instead became malicious, and active in wanting harm.”
― Claire McKenna, Monstrous Heart