Neil > Neil's Quotes

“Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
― John Donne, Meditation XVII - Meditation 17

“These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
― Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Unscrew the locks from the doors !
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs ! ”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Nothing is more real than nothing.”
― Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

“Away! Away! The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth... Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Je est un autre.”
― Rimbaud

“The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity. ”
― Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms Vol. 1

“One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

“The motions of Grace, the hardness of heart; external circumstances.”
― Blaise Pascal