Benjamin Barham > Benjamin's Quotes

“Prejudice is the emotional commitment to ignorance.”
― Nathan Rutstein

“In the Desert

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
― Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines

“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“It's hard to overstate how deep the need can get for things to make sense.”
― John Darnielle

“Don't mess with me, lady. I've been drinking with skeletons.”
― Mike Mignola

“He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Reality continues to ruin my life.”
― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“I'm killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.”
― Bill Watterson

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anais Nin

“I did not say it was true, only that I believe it.”
― Mike Mignola, Hellboy, Vol. 7: The Troll Witch and Others

“There are so many different kinds of ghosts.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“A Man Said to the Universe

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
― Stephen Crane, War Is Kind and Other Poems

“I simply go about my passage swiftly and silently, with a certain deliberate, dark efficiency.”
― George Carlin, Brain Droppings

“He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.”
― T. Harry Williams, McClellan, Sherman, and Grant

“We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“[W]hen you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“The sadness will last forever.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“I try more and more to be myself, caring relatively little whether people approve or disapprove.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very last. But the wilderness found him out early, and had taken vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the faces of a danger it is unable to comprehend.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Hunger, Red—to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth—is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red