Lee Thompson > Lee's Quotes

“Their dad said, “Heaven is beautiful like your mother was beautiful, but like it beauty is fleeting and once beheld for years, for decades, gold that seemed precious and unique no longer holds the significance it once held to the one who has possessed it and been possessed by it. And heaven resides in God’s breast, not the true god, for there is no true god, only many faces and many incarnations of want, of structure, of meaning. And his heart-tent is vast drawing to it those who swear allegiance to beauty and partial truth. Partial,” their father said, stroking Maggie’s arm, “because truth is independent of religion or creed or upbringing. It is a matter of the heart, separate from fact, without the limitations of doctrine. And what would heaven feel like? More of the same corrupt single-mindedness of a deity who abhors independence, who truly and fiercely fights the accumulation of knowledge in its worshipers. So the weak run to it, the road-weary, the undecided. Because God makes things easy, they do not have to make choices for themselves, they do not have to study the greater mysteries that echo like a clarion call in their souls and resonate in their hearts, seeds planted in the dark soil of their youth that are burned to chaff in the commonplace, never tilled or watered, hopeless due to acquiescence.”
― Lee Thompson, The Collected Songs of Sonnelion

“He whispered, “Follow me,” though he had no idea where to go. There was a time, not long ago, when his instincts had kept him alive on the dark streets, the long beats, with rain hammering down on gun-toting punks, slick drug dealers, prostitutes with sharp teeth. He’d thought it a mad world then, and he thought it now, It’s a sharp, mad world. It’ll bleed you out.”
― Lee Thompson, Down Here In The Dark

“No one ever has the answers you need, the ones you want most, the ones you whisper as you lay alone in your bed with the lights extinguished and the lonely ache of loss settling in.”
― Lee Thompson, The Dampness Of Mourning

“For a moment they still lived and I experienced their deaths as a fresh loss with each waking, so that I was unsure whether I was a man waking from a dream of death or a dreamer entering a world of loss, a man dreaming of unhappiness or a man waking to grief.”
― John Connolly, Every Dead Thing

“I not only use all the brains that I have, but all I can borrow.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.”
― Mark Twain

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marcel Proust

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“Just remember that Dumbo didn't need the feather; the magic was in him. ”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
― Gandhi

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“There are no stronger fetters than those we forge for ourselves.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“We are the choices we make.”
― Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

“When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, then there's either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world.
And there's nothing wrong with my skills.”
― Jonathan Maberry, Patient Zero

“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”
― Coco Chanel

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Who would bring light must endure burning.”
― David Zindell, The Wild

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
― Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

“We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.”
― William Faulkner, Essays, Speeches & Public Letters

“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”
― William C. Faulkner

“I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.”
― William Faulkner

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”
― William Faulkner

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”
― William Faulkner

“The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.”
― William Faulkner