Clay Ruby > Clay's Quotes

“For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.”
― W.B. Yeats, Selected Poems and Four Plays

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”
― Emil Cioran

“My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.”
― André Breton, What Is Surrealism?: Selected Writings

“When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.”
― Dylan Thomas

“There’s a monument due me by rank already
I’d blow the damn thing up with dynamite
So strongly I hate every kind of dead thing
So much I adore every kind of life!”
― Vladimir Mayakovsky

“Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead – a dead parent, for example – can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.”
― Jaques Derrida

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
― Plato

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“I love three things, I then say. I love a dream of love I once had, I love you, and I love this patch of earth.

And which do you love best?

The dream.”
― Knut Hamsun, Pan

“Your body is a hyacinth,
Into which a monk dips his waxy fingers.
Our silence is a black cavern,
From which a soft animal steps at times
And slowly lowers heavy eyelids.
On your temples black dew drips,
The last gold of expired stars”
― Georg Trakl

“Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics