John Dolan > John's Quotes

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
― Albert Camus

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it; or because it is in your traditions; or because many speak about it; or because it is found in your religious books; or because your teachers and elders believe it; or because you have become attached to it from habit.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“Do you know, by the way, that German is the only language in the world that has a word for ‘pleasure derived from the misfortune of others’? Schadenfreude.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“My job is to assist you in finding the answer that is right for you. Not the answer that would be right for me.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“Karma means ‘action’. Like many, you misunderstand its nature. Past misdeeds can be corrected before your karma ripens: it is not some pre-determined fate. It is what you do now that counts.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“We always have choices in life. It is simply a question of deciding whether we can live with the consequences of our choices.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“How often – I continue reflecting – is it that we see what we want to see, rather than what is really before our eyes. In the trade we call this confirmation bias, and our brains are riddled with it. We take a position on something and thereafter only see whatever confirms that position, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“Some of the streets are, however, genuinely narrow. These same streets may not be filled with machine-gun fire and the dramatic screech of violins, but they overflow with the invisible and innumerable longings of the human heart. Love continues to minister here, but betrayal still wears its perfidious face, hatred hollows out the weak man’s breast, revenge pursues its self-defeating course; and the unfulfilled dreams of the multitude haunt the island like so many hungry ghosts.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“The subconscious mind, like the Good Lord, can work in a mysterious way, and mine has been known to work in a way that is completely unintelligible, if not downright barmy.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“I love Samui in the wee small hours. I especially love it on nights like this when the white moon stares down from the blackness like the pockmarked eye of a blind god. At such times, when the island’s bright signs have paled to grey and the broom of sleep has swept the revellers to their beds, my mind’s cynical crust cracks open a little, and some fanciful poetry leaks in. Then the dark hills appear to me as slumbering prehistoric leviathans, the clouds assume the air of restless ghosts, and the moon-dusted sea murmurs in some long forgotten tongue of the divine.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“Some people are straightforward. What you see is indeed what you get. Their words have no subtext and their hearts are open. Such individuals possess a naïveté which is both striking and humbling, and which inspires trust in others because these people are themselves trusting. They see life essentially through childlike eyes and, because of that, the more cynical members of the human race often consider them foolish and unsophisticated. Those more experienced in the ways of the world view them as easy marks, such stuff as the con-man’s wet dreams are made on.
Straightforward people are very much in the minority, and in today’s world where idealism has become unfashionable and the concept of self-sacrifice unfathomable, they are in all likelihood an endangered species.
For the rest of us, lying and deception is a necessary social skill. One we practice every day. Those – like myself – suckled at the breast of Perfidious Albion especially see the public expression of vulnerability as anathema. We harbour an abhorrence for emotional weakness; and we Brits are by no means the only ones. On a dog-eat-dog planet if you are to thrive, you have to be in control of yourself. Or at least appear to be.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“Everyone burns, as the Buddha says, in their own way. Some burn with anger, some with lust, some with a desire for vengeance, some with fear. But inside us burn many fires, not just one. We are legion, we contain a multitude.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“Despite the perturbations of the world, life goes on.
The sky presents an endless canopy of translucent blue. The still air is suffused with sunshine.
Perhaps tomorrow the beneficent clouds will gather and it will finally rain. The earth will cool and revive and in that seminal moment all our sins perchance will be washed away.
It might happen.
But somehow I doubt it.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“You have compassion but by itself it is not enough. It is almost as if you carry around inside you some dead thing. Some heavy black cinder in your heart that burdens you; a ponderous anchor that tethers you to the past. Until you can burn it away, you can never truly live in the present, in the now. Until you can live in the now, you cannot see things as they really are. Meantime you are a man who is wilfully blind. You have eyes and yet you will not use them.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“Time. So much of our human experience is bound up in time, I muse. It reflects in our everyday colloquialisms, and drives so much of our activities. Yet this obsession with the passing of the hours is a relatively modern phenomenon; an inevitable product of the Industrial Revolution, and its fixation on efficiency. A new master exported by England across the globe, so that in the developed world at least everyone has one wrist on which is clamped the new and unforgiving shackle we call a watch. In less pressurised days, men observed the ageing of the universe through the more sedate changing of the seasons. But no more. Now the hour is king, or the minute and sometimes even the second. We are all people in a rush, where speed is of the essence, and slow is often deployed as a term of abuse.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“How I love Bangkok! It’s so teeming with everything that should be forbidden. I’m not just talking about the sex trade. I also mean the ways of driving, the ways of putting up buildings, environmental management arrangements, the continual attention of con artists and snatch-thieves, and the quaint local custom of peeing in side-streets.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“I took the plug out of the chemical bath of lust that my wits were soaking in and waited for it to empty. I smoked a cigarette while I contemplated the return of reason.”
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

“I wonder briefly whether a schizophrenic Buddhist would be At Two with the universe.”
― John Dolan, Hungry Ghosts

“Sometimes I come across as superficial. Of this I am aware. However, you may be confident that inside my head I am forever plumbing new shallows, finding novel ways to express the obvious, reheating old jokes.”
― John Dolan, Hungry Ghosts

“The spirits of the dead are all around us, but it is we, the living, that are the true hungry ghosts.”
― John Dolan, Hungry Ghosts

“Desire is a chameleon.
He blends into the brickwork and the rocks of those lanes and pathways down which we walk. He lurks like a highwayman at the crossroads of our lives, waiting to rob us of our reason.
And he does so for sport.”
― John Dolan, A Poison Tree

“And when the weariness comes and the nights are sleepless, we will tell each other stories of heroism and hope. We will feed on the memories of better times to fill our cold, empty bellies. We will strive to maintain the fiction of the journey without end, even as we see, in the distance, our final destination.”
― John Dolan, A Poison Tree

“Our children form a large part of our Immortality Project. This is one of the reasons a child’s death cuts so deep; some of the future dies with them. Through them and their descendants, part of us lives on forever, just as it does in the friends we touch and the ripples our actions cause in the world. All these effects are conscripts, earthwork defences against the finality of extinction.”
― John Dolan, A Poison Tree

“Flowers, silence, departure.”
― John Dolan, A Poison Tree

“I waited for the Earth to stop spinning, for the rift to open and swallow us. Yet the ash tree remained framed in the window, refused to fall. Rain streaked the glass. Blood throbbed in my ears. Preternatural silence. The cruellest April.
I was not deceived. What I saw was samsara, illusion. The world had ended. I was sure of it.”
― John Dolan, A Poison Tree

“Time can move quickly when it loses its memory, or when there are no new memories to create. Reality’s vulture flies down and picks at the bones of our dreams.”
― John Dolan, A Poison Tree

“Not all love is good love." Jane”
― Blakely Bennett, My Body-His (Marcello)

“In the comfort of his embrace I lifted my mouth to his and initiated a kiss. Although calling it a kiss was like calling tyrannosaurus rex a small pet.”
― Blakely Bennett, Bittersweet Deceit

“His attention felt more like an irrepressible gravitational pull than mere interest.”
― Blakely Bennett, Bittersweet Deceit

“The Kiss. It seemed like more than a kiss. It felt more like alchemy.”
― Blakely Bennett, Bittersweet Deceit