Jacob Howard > Jacob's Quotes

“Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we’ve always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.”
― Jacques Ellul

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.”
― Jacques Ellul

“Look: each moment is a cradle and a casket: may all life and all death seem strange to you.”
― Marcel Schwob, The Book of Monelle

“When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them.”
― Mark Rothko

“All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers.”
― Gilbert Sorrentino

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― Ezra Pound

“Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.”
― Henry James Sr.

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“I wanted to putt my hand on this hand and hold it still under mine, made still by his made still. Oh he was bright and I was dark and I gave him all my darkness on that ship; but we joined, for all good things in the world, and to find somethin together; and loved, I never knew I could do it and was afraid; and on the bow of the ship that night that he said, "What have we done Christy?"
I said, wonderin too, "But somethin good will come of this, I know somethin good will come of this..."
Only sorrow came.”
― William Goyen, The House of Breath