Pop Bop > Pop's Quotes

“There are four kinds of readers. The first is like the hourglass; and their reading being as the sand, it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second is like the sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third is like a jelly bag, allowing all that is pure to pass away, and retaining only the refuse and dregs. And the fourth is like the slaves in the diamond mines of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, retain only pure gems.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

“He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.

“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
― Raymond Chandler

“He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.”
― W.H. Auden

“Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!”
― Edgar Allan Poe, To Helen

“It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“Los Angeles is a city that appears to have been built to satisfy somebody's desire for a cigarette.”
― Noah Hawley

“So when the world's compounded union breaks, Time ends and to old Chaos all things turn;...Dissolve the engines of the broken world. All great things crush themselves, such end the gods...”
― Lucan's "Pharsalia", 50 A.c.E.

“I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard III

“Everything will be all right in the end. So if it is not all right, then it is not yet the end.”
― Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

“Temba, his arms wide....Shaka, when the walls fell....Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra.”
― Star Trek - Darmok

“Once, the future was only a continuation of the present. All its changes loomed somewhere beyond the horizon. But now the future’s a part of the present.”
― "The Writer" from Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie "Stalker"

“Death to Dream -- You are utterly the stupidest, most self-centered, appallingest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane!”
― Neil Gaiman

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,”
― Coleridge Samuel Taylor 1772-1834

“To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.”
― Whitman, Walt, - Leaves of Grass

“Philately may be the harmless affair of consenting philatelists, but it is not the concern of the postman." (referencing his dismissal of academic reviewers)”
― Alan Garner, Powsels and Thrums: Tales from a Creative Life