Tom > Tom's Quotes

“The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Oh, to be old again,” said the young corpse.”
― Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

“When you’re not used to comfort and good things to eat, you’re intoxicated by them in no time. Truth’s only too pleased to leave you. Very little’s ever needed for Truth to let go of you. And after all, you’re not really very keen to keep hold of it.”
― Louis Ferdinand Céline

“Don't forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.”
― Sherman Edwards, 1776: A Musical Play

“The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.”
― H.L. Mencken

“As a person is so must you humor them.”
― Publious Terentius Afer

“In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

“Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part, you know, the part of-how shall I say, I don’t know.”
― Samuel Beckett

“When boys and girls go out to play there is always someone left behind, and the boy who is left behind is no use to the girl who is left behind.”
― Paul Potts

“To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.”
― Jules Renard

“Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it.”
― William Butler Yeats

“The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuous in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.”
― Machiaveli

“The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Freedom—a drunken whore
Sprawling in a power maddened soldier’s arms.”
― Marina Tsevtaeva

“When you meet a pretty teenage girl, make a beeline for the mother. I’ve found it to be usually very rewarding.”
― Jeffrey Barnard

“The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed-a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh. I think this is why the epoch of the dinosaurs exerts such a strange fascination on us: it is an epic food orgy with king-size actors who convey unmistakably what organisms are dedicated to. Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet, and one of the reasons that Darwin so shocked his time-and still bothers ours-is that he showed this bone crushing, blood-drinking drama in all its elementality and necessity: Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person’s life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.”
― Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil