Patrick > Patrick's Quotes

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  • #1
    Jean Rhys
    “A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That's all any room is.”
    Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

  • #2
    Kathy Acker
    “There is no master narrative nor realist perspective to provide a background of social and historical facts.”
    Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

  • #3
    Walter Benjamin
    “A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
    Walter Benjamin

  • #4
    Eduardo Galeano
    “I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”
    Eduardo Galeano

  • #5
    Samuel R. Delany
    “Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.”
    Samuel R. Delaney

  • #6
    Joanna Russ
    “This book is written in blood.

    Is it written entirely in blood?

    No, some of it is written in tears.

    Are the blood and tears all mine?

    Yes, they have been in the past, but the future is a different matter.

    As the bear swore in Pogo after having endured a pot shoved on her head, being turned upside down while still in the pot, a discussion about her edibility, the lawnmowering of her behind, and a fistful of ground pepper in the snoot, she then swore a mighty oath on the ashes of her mothers (i.e. her forebears) grimly but quietly while the apples from the shaken apple tree above her dropped bang thud on her head:

    OH, SOMEBODY ASIDES ME IS GONNA RUE THIS HERE PARTICULAR DAY.”
    Joanna Russ, The Female Man

  • #7
    China Miéville
    “The sea is full of saints. You know that? You know that: you're a big boy.

    The sea's full of saints and it's been full of saints for years. Since longer than anything. Saints were there before there were even gods. They were waiting for them, and they're still there now.

    Saints eat fish and shellfish. Some of them catch jellyfish and some of them eat rubbish. Some saints eat anything they can find. They hide under rocks; they turn themselves inside out: they spit up spirals. There's nothing saints don't do.

    Make this shape with your hands. Like that. Move your fingers. There, you made a saint. Look out, here come another one! Now they're fighting! Yours won.

    There aren't any big corkscrew saints anymore, but there are still ones like sacks and ones like coils, and ones like robes with flapping sleeves. What's your favourite saint? I'll tell you mine. But wait a minute, first, do you know what it is makes them all saints? They're all a holy family, they're all cousins. Of each other, and of ... you know what else they're cousins of?

    That's right. Of gods.
    Alright now. Who was it made you? You know what to say.

    Who made you?”
    China Miéville, Kraken

  • #8
    Gore Vidal
    “I believe there's something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I'm all for violence. It's the only thing Americans understand.”
    Gore Vidal

  • #9
    Karl Marx
    “Your favourite virtue ... Simplicity
    Your favourite virtue in man ... Strength
    Your favourite virtue in woman ... Weakness
    Your chief characteristic ... Singleness of purpose
    Your idea of happiness ... To fight
    Your idea of misery ... Submission
    The vice you excuse most ... Gullibility
    The vice you detest most ... Servility
    Your aversion ... Martin Tupper
    Favourite occupation ... Book-worming
    Favourite poet ... Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
    Favourite prose-writer ... Diderot
    Favourite hero ... Spartacus, Kepler
    Favourite heroine ... Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
    Favourite flower ... Daphne
    Favourite colour ... Red
    Favourite name ... Laura, Jenny
    Favourite dish ... Fish
    Favourite maxim ... Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]
    Favourite motto ... De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].”
    Karl Marx

  • #10
    Antonio Gramsci
    “Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one like.”
    Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks



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