John > John's Quotes

“It’s not the thought of death. No, that’s not the reason you ache in the springtime, like the chill you get by drinking water after you’ve sucked on a cough drop, although it’s not really an ache either, but a sorrow, a stab of worry, over what?, you wonder, and continue: over life unlived.”
― Tor Ulven, Replacement

“One lives in the naive notion that "later" there will be more room than in the entire past.”
― Elias Canetti, The Human Province

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955