Ryan Williamson > Ryan's Quotes

“The dreams were eloquent, but they were also beautiful. That aspect seemed to escape Freud in his theory of dreams. Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about the things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“what HAD come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“All traffic with the brains drowned realm is sorcery: Our bards, salvaging notions from their minds to plant in those of others, where they grow to splendours, else atrocities”
― Alan Moore, From Hell

“To share fear is the greatest bond of all. The hunter must become the thing he hunts. What is, is now, must have the quivering intensity of an arrow thudding into a tree. Yesterday is dim and monochrome. A week ago you were not born.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

“For a bird, there are only two sorts of bird: their own sort, and those that are dangerous. No others exist. The rest are just harmless objects, like stones, or trees, or men when they are dead.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

“Fear releases power. Man might be more tolerable, less fractious and smug, if he had more to fear. I do not mean fear of the intangible, the suffocation of the introvert, but physical fear, cold, sweating fear for one's life, fear of the unseen menacing beast, imminent, bristly, tusked and terrible, ravening for one's own hot saline blood.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

“It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“...often inquisitors create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics where they do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven to share in it, in their hatred of the judges. Truly, a circle conceived by the devil.”
― Umberto Eco

“The truth of the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of it's 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 mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The recovery of the outcasts demanded reduction of the privileges of the powerful, so the excluded who became aware of their exclusion had to be branded as heretics, whatever their doctrine. And for their part, blinded by their exclusion, they were not really interested in any doctrine. This is the illusion of heresy. Everyone is heretical, everyone is orthodox. The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion... Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“I was careful then to present myself as just another immigrant, glad to be in the land where the pursuit of happiness was guaranteed in writing, which, when one comes to think of it, is not such a great deal. Now a guarantee of happiness -- that's a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer