mark monday > mark's Quotes

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

“The further in you go, the bigger it gets.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice

“Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”
― Angela Carter

“Notice this rent in my garment; I am at a loss to explain its presence! I am even more puzzled by the existence of the universe.”
― Jack Vance, Tales of the Dying Earth

“Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.”
― Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background

“There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness and death.”
― Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life

“My cow is not pretty, but it is pretty to me.”
― David Lynch

“It’s too bad that stupidity isn’t painful.”
― Anton LaVey

“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.”
― Djuna Barnes

“The first step towards mastering time is always to make time meaningless”
― Robert Aickman

“No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

“I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“I'm for open-mindedness and tolerance. I'm against any form of fanaticism, fundamentalism or zealotry, and this certainty of 'We have the truth.' The truth is far too large and complex. Nobody has the truth.”
― Philip Pullman

“I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things.”
― Edmund White, Forgetting Elena

“When the tragedies of others become for us diversions, sad stories with which to enthrall our friends, interesting bits of data to toss out at cocktail parties, a means of presenting a pose of political concern, or whatever…when this happens we commit the gravest of sins, condemn ourselves to ignominy, and consign the world to a dangerous course. We begin to justify our casual overview of pain and suffering by portraying ourselves as do-gooders incapacitated by the inexorable forces of poverty, famine, and war. “What can I do?” we say, “I’m only one person, and these things are beyond my control. I care about the world’s trouble, but there are no solutions.” Yet no matter how accurate this assessment, most of us are relying on it to be true, using it to mask our indulgence, our deep-seated lack of concern, our pathological self-involvement.”
― Lucius Shepard, The Best of Lucius Shepard

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
― Simone Weil

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Show some fucking adaptability!”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.