Patrick > Patrick's Quotes

“I once tried hawking my own book around the pubs in the hope that, like the Salvation Army, I too could sell to the cerebrally relaxed. It was a disaster. I had beer thrown over me for being a) a nuisance, b) not as good as Wordsworth and c) a nancy for writing poetry in the first place.”
― Peter Finch

“It [Joyce's "Ulysses"] plays on the reader's sympathies to his own undoing unless sleep kindly intervenes and puts a stop to this drain of energy. Arrived at page 135, after making several heroic efforts to get at the book, to "do it justice", as the phrase goes, I fell at last into profound slumber.”
― C.G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature

“The book [Joyce's "Ulysses"] can just as well be read backwards, for it has no back and no front, no top and no bottom. Everything could easily have happened before, or might have happened afterwards. You can read any of the conversations just as pleasurably backwards, for you don't miss the point of the gags. Every sentence is a gag, but taken together they make no point. You can also stop in the middle of a sentence--the first half still makes sense enough to live by itself, or at least seems to. The whole work has the character of a worm cut in half, that can grow a new head or a new tail as required.”
― C.G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature

“The men of the period of corruption are witty and calumnious; they know that there are yet other ways of murdering than by the dagger and ambush--they know also that all that is well said is believed in.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.”
― Lous-Ferdinand Céline

“Neither I nor the four flippers of the sea-bear of the Boreal ocean have been able to solve the riddle of life.”
― Lautréamont

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!" deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“How are his poems?"
"He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.”
― Charles Bukowski, Hollywood