Debbie McGowan > Debbie's Quotes

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“All penguins are the same below the surface, which I think is as perfect an analogy as we're likely to get for the futility of racism.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“I'm very emotional; I think I may go mad in several years' time.”
― Freddie Mercury

“
Focus on someone else’s problems for a change, I instructed myself. You need the practice.
From now on you’ll have to live in a world you didn’t make up. Horrible thought.”
― Josh Lanyon, Somebody Killed His Editor

“A bit needy !! We're raving needopaths!!”
― Al Cockmeister

“The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.”
― Michel Foucault

“Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.”
― Jack Kerouac

“The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).”
― Michel Foucault

“Where there is power, there is resistance.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“The weight of the world is love.
Under the burden of solitude,
under the burden of dissatisfaction
the weight,the weight we carry is love. ”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.”
― Angela Carter

“When on the eve of glory, whilst brooding over the prospects of a bright and happy future, whilst meditating upon the risky right of justice, there we remain, wanderers on the cloudy surface of mental woe, disappointment and danger, inhabitants of the grim sphere of anticipated imagery, partakers of the poisonous dregs of concocted injustice. Yet such is life.”
― Amanda McKittrick Ros, Irene Iddesleigh

“The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”
― Jack Kerouac

“God is in the mountains. Impassive, immovable, jagged giants, separating the celestial from the terrestrial with eternal diagonal certainty. As if silently monitoring the beating heart of the creator from the universe's perfect birth. Stood in the thin air and the awe, one inhales God, involuntarily acknowledging that we are but fragments of a whole, a higher thing. The mountains remind me of my place, as a servant to truth and wonder. Yes, God is in the mountains. Perhaps the pulpit too and even in the piety of an atheist's sigh. I don't know; but I feel him in the mountains.”
― Russell Brand, Booky Wook 2: This Time it's Personal

“Human beings can get used to virtually anything, given plenty of time and no choice in the matter whatsoever.”
― Tom Holt, Open Sesame

“Love is an optical illusion that makes you believe the object of your affection is the most beautiful person in the world.”
― Tom Holt, In Your Dreams

“After all, what else is scientific enquiry of any sort other than a controlled version of banging one's head against the universe until something gives?”
― Tom Holt

“Does it mean this, does it mean that, that's all anybody wants to know. I'd say what any decent poet would say if anyone dared ask him to analyze his work: if you see it, darling, then it's there!”
― Freddie Mercury

“He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”
― Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

“Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

“You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.”
― Michel Foucault

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“I'm sufficient of a doctrinaire to believe that the novel is the product of a leisured class. Actually.”
― Angela Carter

“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.”
― Jack Kerouac

“What would she have made of her life in the absence of childbirth? Maybe no more than she did in its presence and to ponder such possibilities denies the value of motherhood.”
― Debbie McGowan, Hiding Behind The Couch