Mark Phillips > Mark's Quotes

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
― Mark Twain

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I cannot live without books.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“I am persecuted because of my writings, I think, therefore, that I should write some more.”
― Dr. Eric Williams, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
― Mark Twain

“And I don’t believe in this materialism, in this consumer society, in this capitalism, in this outrageous horror that happens / takes place here…. I really do believe in something, and I call it “a day will come.” And one day it will come. Well, probably it won’t come, since they’ve always destroyed it for us…. It won’t come, and I believe in it anyway. Because if I can’t believe in it anymore then I can’t write anymore either.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann

“The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.”
― Doris Lessing

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?-Or at least, "Do you care about the same truth?”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
― Emma Lazarus

“Snowden was horrified to discover that behind bars he would have no access to a computer.”
― Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“You should never, never doubt something that no one is sure of.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
― Richard P. Feynman

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

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass

“Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read.
-Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don't get through or they're returned with 'rejected' scrawled across 'em.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“There is a larger lesson here, because the book encompasses not just the lives of prisoners in a Soviet prison camp, but every one of us. Shukhov squeezes everything he can out of a mouthful of soup or a bite of bread…So frozen that he can’t even feel his feet, he trowels cement and lays a cinder block wall with care and patience…Shukhov takes pride in his work. In fact, even though he is starving, he can barely tear himself away at the end of the long day to go eat. He cares about his work and in that way he remains a man. Isn’t this kind of pride and gratitude and ironic detachment valuable for all people?”
― Eric Bogosian, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“How can you expect a man who's warm to understand a man who's cold?”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“Work, he said, was a first-rate medicine for any illness.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

“That bowl of soup—it was dearer than freedom, dearer than life itself, past, present, and future.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich