Tom Conrad > Tom's Quotes

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#1

“In life one of Midnight’s favourite movies had been It’s a Wonderful Life, a touching story where a man called George Bailey is shown how poor the world would have been if he’d never existed, but now the young ghost of Midnight Merlot was sat imagining himself not as the kind hero of his own narrative, but, - but as the anti-George.”
― Tom Conrad

tags: afterlife, death, existence, ghosts, life, murder, ravens

1 likes

#2

“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
― Oliver Cromwell.

tags: anarchy, arrogance, civil-war, delusion, power, republicanism, truth

19 likes

#3

“How do you stop those who will stop at nothing?”
― Battle in Seattle Film

tags: fairness, fight, freedom, justice

15 likes

#4

“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class And Literature

14 likes

#5

“That's the beauty of argument, if you argue correctly, you're never wrong.”
― Christopher Buckley

tags: argument, humor, right, thank-you-for-smoking, wrong

106 likes

#6

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.”
― Truman Capote

tags: success

15 likes

#7

“I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.”
― Bill Bryson, Lost Continent: Travels In Small-Town America

294 likes

#8

“For a more than miffed Midnight, fate was for emperors, fools and soppy lovers: - fate was the self-important egotism of those doing well, the sheer unbearable arrogance of the living and loved.”
― Tom Conrad

tags: afterlife, arrogance, chance, destiny, fate, fools, ghosts, love, midnight-merlot, rich-pickings-for-ravens, tom-conrad

3 likes

#9

“To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
― E.E. Cummings

tags: poetry

6621 likes

#10

“It’s madness to see life as it is and not how it should be.”
― Knight of the woeful countenance

tags: cervantes, dox-quiote, madness, man-of-la-mancha, perception, reality, truth

6 likes

#11

“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.”
― Bill Hicks

tags: humour, philosophy

1741 likes

#12

“The banana flavour of his accidental conception, and the banana theme of his accidental death, now all seemed to conspire against him and rather suggest the universe, Mr Fate or whoever did have some sort of master plan after all. Despite all his earlier conjecturing, maybe the universe, Mr Fate or whoever was laughing its fat and meddling head at him. The outlandish evidence did seem to speak for itself, truly suggesting a mocking narrative devised by some mischievous author because quite simply a banana condom had brought Midnight into the world and a banana skin had seen him out. Putting those two seeming truths together, Midnight was once again forced to ask such confused and searching questions like:

What is this place, where am I heading? And what’s the deal with all the ruddy bananas?”
― Tom Conrad

tags: bananas, chance, conception, fate, ghosts, midnight-merlot, monikers, providence, rich-pickings-for-ravens, the-afterlife-crisis, unusual-names

2 likes

#13

“Detective Inspector Eccles sighed. He may ordinarily have met his sigh with the question of why the newly appointed Superintendent Dickinson was turning up to this late hour crime scene, he may also ordinarily question why his superior officer was dressed as Julius Caesar, in full tunic and green leafy wreath, yet ever since the new and youngest-ever-appointed superintendent had arrived at the Met it had been all too clear he was an officer who didn’t quite do things by the eBook.”
― Tom Conrad

tags: comedy, crime-scenes, detectives, ebooks, humour, murder, pomposity

1 likes

#14

“I’d once again see that bob of blonde hair back on my pillow, that pink hot smile beaming toward me as I heroically win her heart in some kind of Count of Monte Cristo or Great Gatsby-esque gesture… you know minus the long imprisonment or swimming pool death!”
― Tom Conrad

tags: anti-love, apocalypse, end-of-the-world, gatsby, heroes, heroic, infected, love, obsession, twisted-love, zombies

4 likes

#15

“He grumbles incoherently, opens the window a fraction and continues to smoke away. It’s like every time Sidney Drake enters a new location he has to readjust the atmosphere, akin to one of those sci-fi shows where they oxygenate the planet, but for my dad it’s in a suffocating reverse. He replaces the clean wholesome air with a non-stop puff of toxic poison.”
― Tom Conrad

tags: air, apocalypse, breathe, end-of-the-world, family-saga, oxygen, sci-fi, smoking, star-trek, zombies

6 likes

#16

“I'm a struggling writer, I'm struggling to convince people I'm a writer.”
― Tom Conrad

tags: aspiring, authors, indie-authors, perceptions, struggle, would-be-writer, writer, writing

5 likes

#17

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

tags: art, arts-and-humanities, creative-process, writing

4459 likes

#18

“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

tags: afterlife, atheism, humanism, secularism

2183 likes

#19

“To be is to do - Socrates

To do is to be - Sartre

Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra”
― Kurt Vonnegut

tags: humor

1779 likes

#20

“A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House

907 likes

#21

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

tags: america, books, politics

4417 likes

#22

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

tags: action, attitude, choice, imagination, inspiration, life, pretend

18017 likes

#23

“Lust fades after climax, love lasts until breakfast!”
― Tom Conrad

tags: fiction, love, love-story, lovers, lust, romance, semicolons, sex

12 likes

#24

“My mind may be in gutter, Abigail, but at least I’m looking at an angel!”
― Tom Conrad

tags: angel, beauty, gutter, love, lovers, romance, wilde

1 likes

#25

“The punter sweated on top of Marina, his lips all over her young body, his tongue slipping out from rows of crooked teeth, pushing hungrily from between his shrivelled lips like a clam from a shell, a bottom feeder searching for salty nutrition.”
― Tom Conrad

tags: clam, crooked, crooked-teeth, novel-in-a-novel, nutrition, prose, tom-conrad

1 likes

#26

“I was, a near grown man, sat in his dank, dark and rickety digs, feverishly hovering about the glare of a computer screen like a disorientated moth, one searching for a flaming light of recognition from someone/anyone!”
― Tom Conrad

tags: indie, love, madness, moths, punctuation, revenge, sticklers, technology, that-semicolon-bitch-had-to-die, tom-conrad, twisted-romance, twitter, writer

3 likes

#27

“When people pose the question, are you “coxom”, Tom Conrad? I like to pose a question back at them: Is J.K. Rowling actually a witch? Is Thomas Harris the no. 1 serial killer in the the US, did Yann Martell really spend a lifetime eating pie?

Of course, as far as I know J.K. Rowling is not a witch, but instead is a rather lovely and talented writer. As for that Thomas Harris (equally talented), I very much suspect he isn’t actually a serial killer at all, or if he is, he’s involved in the biggest case of double bluff… ever! As for Yann Martell, well, as everyone with half a brain knows his book is actually concerned with a mathematical constant, so ignore the dumb pie joke. Hm :/”
― Tom Conrad, Rich Pickings for Ravens

tags: coxom, fiction, fiction-and-reality, indie-authors, jk-rowling, no-1-serial-killer, yann-martell

3 likes

#28

“I am not depressed; my life is just shit. As a consequence of my not being depressed, I am not like them. You need to know this from the very off. You need to know I, Arch Fry, will not allow myself to be neatly pigeonholed, erroneously labelled or closed off in some tidy little box - one to be shelved away and conveniently forgotten about.
No, I am not depressed: NOT. DEPRESSED.
You see, I’m just not stuck in some deep unassailable chasm like all the rest, like all these other poor fuckers who’ve so readily accepted that noose of a word.”
― Tom Conrad, Depressed

tags: cancer, depressed, depression, rape, spilt-milk, therapy

6 likes

#29

“Mark raised his eyebrows, ‘you don't know the half of it,’ he further mumbled, more to himself than in reply to Frankie. ‘But listen up; because this isn’t about me anyway; this is about you, about how you need to sort it out, yeah? This is all about you getting yourself a girl, and settling down, right?’

Frankie offered up a wistful kind of sigh, supping his pint as those heavily suggestive words immediately grated: settle down and never settle up.”
― Tom Conrad, That Coxom & Blondage Affair

tags: coupled-up, growing-old, marriage, marriage-humour, settle-down, settle-up, settling-on-second-best

1 likes

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