Jon Gorga > Jon's Quotes

“I watch them through the glass: specimens. Flies. I watch them. And I know. In ways normal men cannot: I know. I see thing: beyond things. I see the strands of fate that bind us: victims to victor. So let them scream; let them shout my name. My ears hear nothing but the weaving of the web.”
― J.M. DeMatteis

“Writers like to believe they're in control of their material, but that's just a comforting lie. After more than twenty-five years of making my life as storyteller, it's become extremely -sometimes painfully- clear to me that I'm just a vehicle, a way for the story to get out into the world. But it's the story itself that does the telling.”
― J.M. DeMatteis, The Amazing Spider-Man: Kraven's Last Hunt

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
― Plato

“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
― Plato

“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

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

“I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase - still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other; that much I've learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Bugger this. I want a better world.”
― Warren Ellis, The Authority, Vol. 2: Under New Management

“These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb.”
― Najwa Zebian

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”
― Charles Addams

“If sacred places are spared the ravages of war... then make all places sacred. And if the holy people are to be kept harmless from war... then make all people holy.”
― J. Michael Straczynski, Silver Surfer: Requiem

“Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool.”
― Voltaire

“I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.”
― Bertrand Russell

“I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one. An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world worth having. we must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders