Patrick Reinhart > Patrick's Quotes

“As I see it, life is an effort to grip before they slip through one's fingers and slide into oblivion, the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current and are lost for ever in oblivion's black ocean.”
― Mervyn Peake

“He (Lafcadio) was sitting all alone in a compartment of the train which was carrying him away from Rome, & contemplating–not without satisfaction–his hands in their grey doeskin gloves, as they lay on the rich fawn-colored plaid, which, in spite of the heat, he had spread negligently over his knees. Through the soft woolen material of his traveling-suit he breathed ease and comfort at every pore; his neck was unconfined in its collar which without being low was unstarched, & from beneath which the narrow line of a bronze silk necktie ran, slender as a grass snake, over his pleated shirt. He was at ease in his skin, at ease in his shoes, which were cut out of the same doeskin as his gloves; his foot in its elastic prison could stretch, could bend, could feel itself alive. His beaver hat was pulled down over his eyes & kept out the landscape; he was smoking dried juniper, after the Algerian fashion, in a little clay pipe & letting his thoughts wander at their will …”
― Andre Gide

“The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by the commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far, far beyond the mad, beat, half-hysterical laughter... the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever.”
― Fritz Leiber

“Even a strong man can succumb to the wiles of a pretty girl with pointy shoes.”
― Joseph Delaney, Attack of the Fiend

“By Gad,' exclaimed Welsh, 'I’d manage a nunnery for £500!'

'I daresay you would, but a suicidal, and possibly homicidal, lunatic isn’t a nunnery.'

Welsh looked at his friend with diminished respect.”
― J. Storer Clouston, The Lunatic at Large

“I mean, if you could have a wizard grant a wish, would you waste it on going to Kansas?”
― Michael Buckley

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“...now and then a giggling trail of mermaids appeared in our wake. We fed them oatmeal.”
― Tove Jansson, Moominpappa's Memoirs

“We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect.”
― Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”
― Salvador Dali

“Love is a myth.'
'Love is a myth,' Grandfather Trout said. 'Like summer.'
'What?'
'In winter,'Grandfather Trout said, 'summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. Get it? Love is a myth. So is summer.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

“Is it nice, my preciousss? Is it juicy? Is it scrumptiously crunchable?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“All the best geniuses are evil,”
― Gail Carriger, Curtsies & Conspiracies

“So,” Wanda cried, “a woman in furs is nothing more than a large cat, a charged electric battery?”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“Are you a storyteller, Thomas Covenant?"
Absently he replied, "I was, once."
"And you gave it up? Ah, that is as sad a tale in three words as any you might have told me. But a life without a tale is like a sea without salt. How do you live?"
... Unconsciously, he clenched his fist over his ring. "I live."
"Another?" Foamfollower returned. "In two words, a story sadder than the first. Say no more -- with one word you will make me weep.”
― Stephen R. Donaldson