James > James's Quotes

“The characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages and nations. As one age falls, another rises, different to mortal sight, but to immortals only the same; for we see the same characters repeated again and again, in animals, vegetables, minerals, and in men. Nothing new occurs in identical existence; Accident ever varies, Substance can never suffer change nor decay.

Of Chaucer's characters, as described in his Canterbury Tales, some of the names or titles are altered by time, but the characters themselves for ever remain unaltered; and consequently they are the physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter.”
― William Blake, William Blake Seen in My Visions /anglais

“I like to stay a part of that stuff that don’t change. Actually, it’s not that difficult - people still love and they still hate, they still marry and have children, still slaves in their minds to their desires, still slap each other in the face, and say ‘honey can you turn off the light’ just like they did in ancient Greece. What’s changed? When did Abraham break his father's idols? I think it was last Tuesday.”
― Bob Dylan, Biograph

“It is impossible to think of an ideal human life except as an alternation of individual and social life, as equally a belonging and an escape.”
― Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature

“A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound—as Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued—a myth can be true. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it—the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.”
― Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.”
― William S. Burroughs

“a lonely leaf would occasionally spin downwards to rejoin on the grass the scathed multitude of its comrades which had preceded it in its fall.”
― Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean

“He spoke in squarely shaped sentences, and was supremely satisfied with a condition of sublunary things which made weapons a necessity.”
― Thomas Hardy, Wessex tales

“Neophytes of the mighty serpent, how many lurked among his cities?”
― Robert E. Howard, The Shadow Kingdom and Other Works by Robert E. Howard

“These fiends can take any form they will. That is, they can, by a magic charm or the like, fling a web of sorcery about their faces, as an actor dons a mask, so that they resemble anyone they wish to.”
― Robert E. Howard, The Shadow Kingdom and Other Works by Robert E. Howard