James Everington > James's Quotes

“A sweeping vista of Northern sky opens up between the warehouses and hangs motionless above the cobbled streets. It’s a world of unrequited love beneath the smoke stacks and awkward moments in the underpass. A great crashing wave of romantic despair that washes over my dramatic heart, dousing it with a thin grey rinse. I’m James Dean, I’m Albert Camus, I posture in doorways with a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth. My great iron bedstead, my kitchen sink drama, the grainy black and white days of this life...”
― Neil Schiller, Oblivious

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“When I Am Dead, My Dearest

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress-tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.”
― Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems

“Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.”
― Andre Jute

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”
― Robert Bloch

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“He turned slowly like a fridge door opening.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“I'll be a story in your head. That's okay. We're all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? 'Cause it was, you know. It was the best. The daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away. Did I ever tell you that I stole it? Well I borrowed it. I was always going to take it back.”
― Steven Moffat