Daniel Carpenter > Daniel's Quotes

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“He'd tell me love was like the chicken pox, a thing to get through early because it could really kill you in your later years.”
― Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

“If you were an animal, what would you be?" I wrote, "A bumblebee trying to fuck a marble.”
― Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

“Anything can become music if listened to long enough”
― Jeff Noon

“Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our lives against that which we thought it would be by now.”
― Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn

“Boiled down to its core, the truth is always a simple, solid thing”
― David Simon, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets

“There, in the horseshoe drive, Kelly, gullible and mortal Kelly, awaits an explanation from a bedraggled immortal. The Minotaur accepts this temporary blessing for all it is worth. There are few things that he knows, these among them: that is is inevitable, even necessary, for a creature half man and half bull to walk the face of the earth; that in the numbing span of eternity even the most monstrous among us needs love; that the minutiae of life sometimes defer to folly; that even in the most tedious unending life there comes, occasionally, hope. One simply has to wait and be ready.”
― Steven Sherrill, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

“God help us both if this is summer.
The sun shines all day and all night
but it has no warmth, no light, no colour.”
― Simon Armitage, Kid

“How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.”
― Don DeLillo, The Names

“Maybe instead of strings it's stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that's why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people's we know, until you've got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter, or even a whole word....”
― Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

“I dreamed I saw you dead in a place by the water. A ravaged place. All flat and empty and wide open. And you were covered in some kind of binding. Like a mummy. Something white and reflective, from head to toe. And the light shone on you. Oh, how it shone on you! It glanced off you, and it was like a pure, bright silver. The wind was singing. It sang: you have suffered enough. You have suffered enough. Then death came and he kissed you. Lightly. Gently. Upon the lips. There is nothing beyond, he whispered, only me, only me. There is nothing beyond. Only me.”
― Nicola Barker, Wide Open

“In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside - there were the same ruthlessness and agression concealed within a set of polite conventions.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“He methodically basted the dark skin of the Alsatian, which he had stuffed with garlic and herbs.
"One rule in life", he murmured to himself. "If you can smell garlic, everything is all right".”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.”
― China Miéville, The Scar

“People in Scotland have a queer idea of the arts. They think you can be an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time dustman, engineer, lawyer or brain surgeon.”
― Alasdair Gray, Lanark

“But stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though. "

"But you don’t get mad. Not like Pop does."

"No, that’s true, I don’t get mad. Not at stories. They do disappoint me sometimes." He looked at the shelves. "Sometimes, they stab me in the heart.”
― Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country

“I never look at a painting and ask, "Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?" It's just a painting.”
― Scott McClanahan, Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place

“I knew he believed in something that none of us ever do anymore. He believed in the nastiest word in the world. He believed in KINDNESS. Please tell me you remember kindness. Please tell me you remember kindness and joy, you cool motherfuckers.”
― Scott McClanahan, Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place

“Stories can actually rearrange continents if they're told long enough.”
― Scott McClanahan, Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place

“She brought herself away from the disagreeably clinging thought by her usual method - imagining the sweet sharp sensation of being burned alive.”
― Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman

“The gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable”
― Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman

“You see,” said Tony, her voice still soft so as not to be overheard, but somehow fierce and angry, “it frightens me when people try to grab at us like that. I can’t sit still and just let people watch me and talk to me and ask me questions. You see,” she said again, as though trying to moderate her words and explain, “they want to pull us back, and start us all over again just like them and doing the things they want to do and acting the way they want to act and saying and thinking and wanting all the things they live with every day.”
― Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman

“And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.”
― John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids

“It’s only when you’ve lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that
phrase “It’s a small world”. It isn’t. It’s a vast, devouring world, especially if you’re alone.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Two

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

“It's odd how much our perception of cities owes to stories and films.We talk about 'Dickensian' London as if it had some real existence beyond the page. Deep down, despite the evidence of our lives, we can't really believe that anything is ever made up.”
― Joel Lane, The Witnesses Are Gone

“A clock is the only instrument specifically constructed for measuring a quantity that is intangible.”
― Nina Allan, The Dollmaker