Grayson > Grayson's Quotes

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Take me with you. For laughs, for luck, for the unknown. Take me with you.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself... Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And
outlive the bastards.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

“Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.”
― Anne Carson

“What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Now every mortal has pain
and sweat is constant,
but if there is anything dearer than being alive,
it's dark to me.
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth--
we call it life. We know no other.
The underworld's a blank
and all the rest just fantasy.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.”
― Anne Carson

“You could take the entirety of the common sense of humans and put it in the palm of your hand and still have room for your dick.”
― Anne Carson, Red Doc>

“Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Komarr

“There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Komarr

“I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, although I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“It’s a rare man who is taken for what he truly is.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“As for you and your heart and the things you said and didn't say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Whatever can die is beautiful — more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world. Do you understand me?”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“You were the one who taught me," he said. "I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling. I became a hero to serve you, and all that is like you.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”
― Dorothy Parker

“I hate writing, I love having written.”
― Dorothy Parker

“How might we respond to the contemporary situation of war? It might seem that the easiest and noblest thing to do is to speak of peace. Yet, as Raymond Williams says in his still hugely relevant book from 1966, Modern Tragedy, “To say peace when there is no peace” is to say nothing.3 To which the obvious response is: say war. But that would be peremptory. The danger of easy pacifism is that it is inert and self-regarding. It is always too pleased with itself. But the alternative is not a justification of war. It is rather the attempt to understand the complex tragic dialectics of political situations, particularly apparently revolutionary ones. Williams goes on to claim, “We expect men brutally exploited and intolerably poor to rest and be patient in their misery, because if they act to end their condition it will involve the rest of us, and threatens our convenience or our lives.”4 Often, we simply want violence and war to go away because it is an inconvenience to us and to our lovely lives. As such, we do not only fail to see our implication in such violence and war, we completely disavow it.”
― Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

“Apples

Ma's apple blossoms
have turned to hard green balls.

To eat them now,
so tart,
would turn my mouth inside out,
would make my stomach groan.

But in just a couple months,
after the baby is born,
those apples will be ready
and we'll make pies
and sauce
and pudding
and dumplings
and cake
and cobbler
and have just plain apples to take to school
and slice with my pocket knife
and eat one juicy piece at a time
until my mouth is clean
and fresh
and my breath is nothing but apple.

June 1934”
― Karen Hesse, Out of the Dust

“…the trouble with oaths of the form, death before dishonor, is that eventually, given enough time and abrasion, they separate the world into two sorts of people: the dead, and the forsworn.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

“There's something to that in both directions," said Ekaterin mildly. "Nothing is more guaranteed to make one start acting like a child than to be treated like one. It's so infuriating. It took me the longest time to figure out how to stop falling into that trap."
"Yes, exactly," said Kareen eagerly. "You understand! So—how did you make them stop?"
"You can't make them—whoever your particular them is—do anything, really," said Ekaterin slowly. "Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste . . . years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just . . . take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that, and walk away. But that's hard.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

“You are lucky, Thorn. You are very lucky."
"Doubtless. Not every girl gets to be stabbed through the face."
"And by a duke of royal blood too!”
― Joe Abercrombie, Half the World

“There is a time for wondering what a man wants,” said Fror, no fear at all in his. “And there is a time for splitting his head. This is that second time.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Half the World

“Brand stared in sick disbelief. He’d been sure among all those lads someone would speak, for they were honest enough. Or Hunnan would tell his part in it, for he was a respected master-at-arms. The king or the queen would draw out the truth, for they were wise and righteous. The gods wouldn’t allow such an injustice to pass. Someone would do something. Maybe, like him, they were all waiting for someone else to put things right.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Half the World

“Once you've got a task to do, it's better to do it than live with the fear of it.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself