Lou > Lou's Quotes

“Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“The saying goes, ‘The black tides of heaven direct the courses of human lives.’ To which a wise teacher said, ‘But as with all waters, one can swim against the tide.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“With all the horrors in the world, it was easy to forget there were wonders too.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“Let the black tides of heaven direct our lives,” he murmured. He turned to look at his partner. “I choose to swim.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“The mountain shrugs, but thinks nothing of the houses crushed in the avalanche. That was not its purpose.” “And that’s meant to be comforting?” “Yes,” said Mokoya, a little too earnestly. “Because it’s not about you, or what you’ve done. There’s no bigger reason to things.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“In the monastery,” Mokoya said, “they taught us that fortune is both intractable and impartial. That when bad things happen, it’s the result of an incomprehensible and inhuman universe working as it does. The mountain shrugs, but thinks nothing of the houses crushed in the avalanche. That was not its purpose.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“Because he had always known, even as a child, that he was the lightning, while she was the fire in the core of planets. And the world needed both. Revolutions needed both. Someone had to wield the knives, but someone also had to write the treaties.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“There are no righteous deaths,” Yongcheow whispered. “Only ones that cannot be avoided.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“The onset of age was like a dam breaking: slowly at first, then all at once.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“It means where we plant our feet is where we must hold up the sky. We live and die by the rules of the land we live in. But this country belongs to all of us! We make our own sky, and we can hold it up—together.”
― Hanna Alkaf, The Weight of Our Sky

“Do not ever let anyone tell you that you do not belong here,” she had said, looking at us intently. “We all do. There is space for us all.”
― Hanna Alkaf, The Weight of Our Sky

“When there is so much broken about the world we currently live in, one cracked person is easy enough to excuse or ignore.”
― Hanna Alkaf, The Weight of Our Sky

“If I’m going to wage battle with demons both on the street and in my own head, I’m going to do it with all of myself, and not weighed down by borrowed clothes and secondhand memories.”
― Hanna Alkaf, The Weight of Our Sky

“Adults rarely like being told that they don’t have all the answers, or worse still, that the answers they do have are all the wrong ones.”
― Hanna Alkaf, The Weight of Our Sky

“Bloody politicians and their bloody stupid rhetoric, speeches, ideologies. You ever hear anyone say words don’t matter after this, you tell them about this day, when Malay idiots and Chinese idiots decided to kill one another because they believed what the bloody politicians told them.”
― Hanna Alkaf, The Weight of Our Sky