Brian > Brian's Quotes

“Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“The world is full of places to which I want to return”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years of mixing with one's kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one's fellow beings. But one doesn't”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“You can't kill a minuet de la coeur. You may shut up the music book... but surely the minuet-- the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must be stepping itself still.”
― Ford Madox Ford

“With each new woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new territory. A turn of the eyebrow, a tone of the voice, a queer characteristic gesture—all these things, and it is these things that cause to arise the passion of love.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious.”
― Ford Madox Ford

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it—you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.”
― Harry Crews, Getting Naked with Harry Crews: Interviews

“There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.”
― Harry Crews

“That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night.”
― Harry Crews, A Feast of Snakes

“Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.”
― Harry Crews, Blood and Grits

“There ought to be a law against the sun rising and setting for you in somebody else.”
― Harry Crews, The Knockout Artist

“survival is triumph enough.”
― Harry Crews

“Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. ... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them.”
― Harry Crews

“If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. ‘Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.”
― Harry Crews

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

“I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut

“If you can do no good, at least do no harm.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five