Austin > Austin's Quotes

“Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion. We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answer to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are lost people.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.”
― Gene Wolfe

“But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened.

"Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“It strikes me that the only real reason to take apart a pocket watch, or a car engine, aside from the simple delight of disassembly, is to find out how it works. To understand it, so you can put it back together again better than before, or build a new one that goes beyond what the old one could do. We’ve been taking apart the superhero for ten years or more; it's time to put it back together and wind it up, time to take it out on the road and floor it, see what it’ll do.”
― Kurt Busiek, Astro City, Vol. 1: Life in the Big City

“There is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure - it is, after all, what everybody does all the time.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.”
― Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“Our virtues make us; but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve.”
― Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done, that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they're mine.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“Context is to data what water is to a dolphin”
― Dan Simmons, Olympos

“As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“Everyone too busy trying to survive to spend any time creating something new.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“I have a scholar's love of silence and solitude. To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“..The argument he was conducting with his neighbor as to whether the English magician had gone mad because he was a magician, or because he was English.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don't deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“In an ideal world, the time English speakers devote to steeling themselves against, and complaining about, things like Billy and me, singular they, and impact as a verb would be better spent attending to genuine matters of graceful oral and written expression.”
― John H. McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

“If a man's at odds to know his own mind it's because he hasn't got aught but his mind to know it with.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West