Michael > Michael's Quotes

“Silence is not an absence. On the contrary, it is the manifestation of a presence, the most intense of all presences. In modern society, silence has come into disrepute; this is a symptom of a serious, worrisome illness. The real questions of life are posed in silence. Our blood flows through our veins without making any noise, and we can hear our heartbeats only in silence.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah

“Film has offered adventure, hope, fantasy, and escape for those of us encased in poverty, limitation, and quiet desperation.”
― David Thomson, How to Watch a Movie

“One might as well, in considering how to watch a movie, recognize the extent to which public life in America has itself become an untidy, unrated motion picture that has a captive but disenchanted audience.”
― David Thomson, How to Watch a Movie

“What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can't live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you're a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you're not free. And you can't hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you're forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Truth, it seems, is always bashful, easily reduced to silence by the too blatant encroachment of falsehood.

The prolonged absence of any free exchange of information within a country opens up a gulf of incomprehension between whole groups of the population, between millions and millions.

We simply cease to be a single people, for we speak, indeed, different languages.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“This fight is not ours. The trumpet call is the sanctus bell that gently rings out. In that silent moment we rally to our Lord Jesus Christ, who is now present and hidden in the holy and venerable hands of the priest. Although widely spread, in that precious and spotless Host we are called together both to fight and to find peace.”
― Taylor R. Marshall, Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within

“If there remains any overriding idea it is that ideas are a problem. If there is any remaining commonly held value judgement it is that value judgements are wrong. If there remains any remaining certainty it is a distrust of certainty. And if this does not add up to a philosophy it certainly adds up to an attitude: shallow, unlikely to survive any sustained onslaught, but easy enough to adopt.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“The eighty-five cent dinner tasted like a discarded mailbag and was served to me by a waiter who looked as if he would slug me for a quarter, cut my throat for six bits, and bury me at sea in a barrel of concrete for a dollar and a half, plus sales tax.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“At around twenty-eight, twenty-nine, or thirty years old, after my kids were born, I figured I'd hit some plateau that was adulthood---where I believed things would just stay level for about forty years while I would do great work and have interesting experiences---then rather uneventfully I would begin to decay and die. But this was just not the case. I was not on a plateau. I was descending, tripping, stumbling, and burning. My whole being, or personality or self or whatever is supposed to be the seat of me, or the soul behind my eyes, was being boiled away in a giant iron cauldron like the flavor leaving a carrot.”
― Ethan Hawke, A Bright Ray of Darkness

“So passed a day in the life of a P.I. Not exactly a typical day but not totally untypical either. What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load a grief, and a small piece of money.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“Gore cinema is not liberating (though the kids who flocked to the theaters may think otherwise), but suffocating, the work of cynical adults having a go at the vulnerability of children.”
― David J. Hogan, Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film

“We don't have long here, children. Our hopes and aspirations may feel limitless, but our days are finite, our experiences fading in the twinkling of an eye. Death is a love note to the living, to regard every day, every breath, as sacred.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world that would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage