Raven > Raven's Quotes

“We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“But this one was a writer, not a reader.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Well, if they would not go to school they must still have their education. And education they had had.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“And I thought to myself, Hell and blast you all, if all you bastards are on the side of Good then I'm glad I belong to the other shop.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“The heresy of an age of reason,' or some such slovos [words]. 'I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. And I see that clearly - that business about marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded, prodded.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“It seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with that swift fate hanging over us, men could go about their petty concerns as they did.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

“I can best express my state of mind by saying that I wanted to be in at the death.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

“But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him; or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.”
― Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”
― H. P. Lovecraft

“Suicide is a form of murder - premeditated murder. It isn't something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slip cover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it; we have something to hide. ”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have. ”
― Alan Bennett

“…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing….”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho