Ben > Ben's Quotes

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“I could carve a better man out of a banana.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.”
― John le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“Then, breaking forth from a bizarre low angle, a ray of light shining up the gorge illuminating a world otherwise cast in darkness by the black rain clouds above. The water reflects a white brilliance. From where I am watching, the mass of glistening white is momentarily blinding. It takes some time for my eyes to adjust to this whiteness and recognise the river. The Franklin River. A world pure and whole and complete unto itself. Neither rubber condoms nor rubber tyres nor tin cans nor dioxins nor bent rusting chrome reminders of the cars they once graced nor any of the other detritrus of our world seem to abide here. This is an alien world. This is the river. Rising in the Cheyne Range. Falling down Mt Gell. Writhing like a snake in the wild lands at the base of the huge massif of Frenchmans Cap. Writing its past and prophesying its future in massive gorges slicing through mountains and cliffs so undercut they call them verandahs, and in eroded boulders and beautiful gilded eggs of river stone, and in beaches of river gravel that shift year to year, flood to flood, and in that gravel that once was rounded river rock that once was eroded boulder that once was undercut cliff that once was mountain and which will be again.”
― Richard Flanagan, Death Of A River Guide

“LIGHT PALE AS MILK guided the old man’s steps over the field to the creek and then to the mountain, stepping into the black wall of pineshadows and climbing up the lower slopes out into the hardwoods, bearded hickories trailing grapevines, oaks and crooked waterless cottonwoods, a quarter mile from the creek now, past the white chopped butt of a bee tree lately felled, past the little hooked Indian tree and passing silent and catlike up the mountain in the darkness under latticed leaves scudding against the sky in some small wind. Light saw him through the thick summer ivy and over windfalls and limestone. Past the sink where on a high bluff among trilobites and fishbones, shells of ossified crustaceans from an ancient sea, a great stone tusk jutted.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“A WARM WIND ON the mountain and the sky darkening, the clouds looping black underbellies until a huge ulcer folded out of the mass and a crack like the earth’s core rending rattled panes from Winkle Hollow to Bay’s Mountain. And the wind rising and gone colder until the trees bent as if borne forward on some violent acceleration of the earth’s turning and then that too ceased and with a clatter and hiss out of the still air a plague of ice.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“Evening. The dead sheathed in the earth’s crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth’s wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with roots, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his clan and kin and rout them from their house. A god insatiable whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Border Trilogy

“Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;
Remember the wisdom out of the old days:
Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,
And the winds that blow through the starry ways,
Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood
Cover over and hide, for he has no part
With the lonely, majestical multitude.”
― W.B. Yeats