Joseph Hamilton > Joseph's Quotes

“The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe." "As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe... Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.”
― Don DeLillo

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“A house is not a home until it has a dog.”
― Gerald Durrell

“We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.”
― Georges Simenon

“As she looked back, the trail behind her faded away and she was way up in the air, with no man behind her and only the smooth trail leading into the sky.”
― Ada Blackjack

“Has anyone told you the dirty sommelier mnemonic for remembering bottles sizes?” ...”'Michael Jackson Really Makes Small Boys Nervous.’” [Magnum, Jeroboam, Rehobaum, Methuselah, Salamanzar, Balthazar, Nebuchadnezzar]”
― Bianca Bosker

“To put the last point another way, writers such as Graves, Sassoon, and Owen saw the Great War as the disease, but Tolkien saw it as merely the symptom.”
― John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I think I still have the right to be afraid and not to talk about it.”
― Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire / The American Friend

“The damage that fashionable attitudes, reflected (and created) by television, have done to the public spirit, is incalculable. It has weakened to the point where it is taken for granted that anyone who has suffered loss and hardship must be in need of counseling” that soldiers will suffer from “post-battle traumatic stress” and need psychiatric help. One wonders how Londoners survived theBlitz without the interference of unqualified, jargon-mumbling “counsellors”, or how the overwhelming number of 1940s servicemen returned successfully to civilian life without benefit of brainwashing.”
― George MacDonald Fraser

“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen