Ryan > Ryan's Quotes

“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Is it more foolish and childish to assume there is a conspiracy, or that there is not?”
― China Miéville, The City & The City

“Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it's we women who control magic.”
― J. G. Ballard, Rushing to Paradise

“The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on it's shroud.”
― J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

“Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?”
― J.G. Ballard

“I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.”
― J.G. Ballard

“The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.”
― Ralph Ellison

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

“Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

“A man is an angel that has gone deranged.”
― Philip K. Dick

“There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive. ”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
― Franz Kafka

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.”
― Ezra Pound

“The temple is holy because it is not for sale.”
― Ezra Pound, The Cantos

“I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.

Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.”
― Ezra Pound

“When you’re in The System, like after being arrested, you’re no longer a participant. You’re being processed. Instead of an easy to ignore, well-greased cog, you become a sharp edge that needs to be ground down.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sixth Borough

“There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars. If the lights prevented you from seeing the heavens, then preform a little magic and change reality to fit the need. The street lights were now planets and stars and moon. ”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

“when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.”
― William S. Burroughs

“The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand”
― Italo Calvino

“Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities