Jay > Jay's Quotes

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Ten thousand dreams ensepulchered within their crozzled hearts.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“About that fire were men whose eyes gave back the light like coals socketed hot in their skulls and men whose eyes did not, but the black man’s eyes stood as corridors for the ferrying through of naked and unrectified night from what of it lay behind to what was yet to come. Any man in this company can sit where it suits him, he said.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

“How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don't deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“I have no enemies. I dont permit such a thing. ”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother’s face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring. Go figure. For me, I might have the leisure to be bored, but not to grow tired of something. Most people can't distinguish between the two.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“This is pretty obvious, but until things happen, they haven't happened. And often things aren't what they seem.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“The world would be a real mess if everybody was a genius. Somebody’s got to keep watch, take care of business.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Approach everything rationally, and you become harsh. Pole along in the stream of emotions, and you will be swept away by the current. Give free rein to your desires, and you become uncomfortably confined. It is not a very agreeable place to live, this world of ours.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Three-Cornered World

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by ten food steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant in the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music.”
― William Faulkner

“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”
― Zhuangzi, The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang Tzu

“If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

“Then Darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien Gandalf the White, The Two Towers

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
― Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

“A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.”
― Hector Berlioz