Timothy Miller > Timothy's Quotes

“This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me," whispered the Rat, as if in a trance.
"Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Soon, leedle proletarians, ve vill have free picnic in the cool shade, ve vill eat hot dogs and trink free beer beneath the villow trees! Like hogs, yes! Like beautiful leedle hogs!”
― Eugene O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh

“So does the eager earth send up shoots through the burial mound and cover it in green. The bones of men are buried beneath every house in every street and along every country ride. The coffins are stacked one atop another all the way down to the center of the earth. Yet mourning is not the natural mould of man. The heart is buoyant as a channel marker.”
― Timothy Miller

“The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

“Every secret is a wrinkle.”
― Arthur Phillips, Prague

“So why did poor artists originally hang around in cafes?"

"I don't know. Inspiration from the atmosphere."

"Ha! No, you've been tricked, too, just like the rest of us. Cafes didn't have inspirational atmosphere at first. That only came later, when you knew artists had been hanging around in them.”
― Arthur Phillips, Prague

“I have a scholar's love of silence and solitude. To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”
― Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

“All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.”
― Steven Millhauser

“Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

“For my part, if a man must needs be a knave I would have him a debonair knave... It makes your sin no worse as I conceive, to do it à la mode and stylishly.”
― Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda

“It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.”
― Agatha Christie, The Clocks

“. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

“Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

“She had been a mentor to so many of her high school students, inviting them over to our house on Mockingbird Lane, helping them learn lines from Shakespeare for the plays she directed. I was in grade school at the time and had loved to listen to their discussions. They seemed to know so much, and I hoped I would absorb their knowledge.”
― Wes Ely, Every Deep-Drawn Breath: A Critical Care Doctor on Healing, Recovery, and Transforming Medicine in the ICU