The Fall Quotes

“I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.”
― Albert Camus

“A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives--all bear secret relations to our destinies.”
― François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe

“One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“There is an old joke that went around- it goes, in the beginning God made man in His own image, and since the fall, man has been seeking to return the compliment.”
― Alistair Begg

“There was a time when I didn’t at any minute have the slightest idea how I could reach the next one. Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man, or merely say evil of one’s neighbour while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.”
― Albert Camus

“God said to him [Eblis], 'You have become proud.' He replied, 'If I had been with you but a moment my pride would have been justified; I have been with you for centuries.”
― Mansur al-Hallaj, The Great Satan

“What we call fundamental truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.”
― Albert Camus

“With every morn my life afresh must break
The crust of self, gathered about me fresh;
That thy wind-spirit may rush in and shake
The darkness out of me, and rend the mesh
The spider-devils spin out of the flesh-
Eager to net the soul before it wake,
That it may slumberous lie, and listen to the snake.
George MacDonald”
― George MacDonald

“How blest was the created state
Of man and woman, ere they fell,
Compared to our unhappy fate:
We need not fear another hell.”
― John Wilmot, The Complete Poems

“I knew it was coming. I knew they didn't have the nerve.
Three days in and they've got faces like vexed tomatoes, their skins flaking sci-fi style: burnt to fuck. They were an embarrassment; not only to me and the wife and The Fall fans but to their own generation.”
― Mark E. Smith, Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

“But still Adam holds his ground. The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the fruit of the tree, and I ate. He confesses his sin, but as he confesses, he takes to flight again. 'You have given me the woman, not I. I am not guilty, you are guilty.' The double light of creation and sin is exploited. 'The woman is surely your creature, it is your own work that has caused me to fall. Why have you brought forth an imperfect creation, and is it my fault?' So instead of surrendering Adam falls back on one art learned from the serpent, that of correcting the idea of God, of appealing from God the Creator to a better, a different God. That is, he flees again. The woman takes to flight with him and blames the serpent; that is, she really blames the Creator of the serpent. Adam has not surrendered, he has not confessed. He has appealed to his conscience, to his knowledge of good and evil, and out of this knowledge he has accused his Creator. He has not recognized the grace of the Creator which proves itself true by the fact that he calls Adam, by the fact that he does not let him flee. Adam sees this grace only as hate, as wrath, and this wrath kindles his own hate, his rebellion, his will to escape from God. Adam remains in the Fall. The Fall accelerates and becomes infinite.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall Temptation: Two Biblical Studies

“I drank a jar of coffee
And I took some of these”
― Mark E. Smith

“Maybe I don’t really want to know what’s going on. Maybe I’d rather not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know.
The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“As we reread Genesis 2...we immediately understand WHAT is 'crafty' about the serpent's question in Genesis 3. God did NOT in fact say in Genesis 2, 'You MUST NOT EAT from any tree in the garden' (3:1). What God did say was almost exactly the opposite: 'You ARE FREE TO EAT from any tree in the garden' (except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, 2:16). The vocabulary of God in Genesis 2 indicates freedom and blessing. The vocabulary of the serpent in Genesis 3 indicates prohibition and restriction. The serpent's ploy is to suggest to the woman that God is really not so good after all. He shifts attention away from all that God in his generosity has provided for his creatures in creation and onto the one thing that God has for the moment explicitly withheld.”
― Iain Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters

“Our old Europe at last philosophizes in the right way. We no longer say as in simple times: 'This is the way I think. What are your objections?' We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have substituted the communiqué: 'This is the truth, we say. You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren’t interested. But in a few years there’ll be the police who will show you we are right.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“She was his Eve. He was her fall. He'd make the leaves of her trees blush, then he'd undress them all.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“So spake our mother Eve, and Adam heard
Well pleased, but answered not; for now too nigh
Th' Archangel stood, and from the other hill
To their fixed station, all in bright array
The Cherubim descended; on the ground
Gliding meteorous, as ev'ning mist
Ris'n from a river o'er the marish glides,
And gathers ground fast at the labourer's heel
Homeward returning. High in front advanced,
The brandished sword of God before them blazed
Fierce as a comet; which with torrid heat,
And vapour as the Libyan air adust,
Began to parch that temperate clime; whereat
In either and the hast'ning angel caught
Our ling'ring parents, and to th' eastern gate
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain; then disappeared.
They looking back, all th' eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“I always hope, in fact, that my interlocutor will be a policeman and that he will arrest me for the theft of ‘The Just Judges’”.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“Mais, dans certains cas, continuer, seulement continuer, voilà ce qui est surhumain.”
― Albert Camus

“The story of the Fall tells us in mythical language that "original sin" is not simply a stigma arbitrarily making good pleasures seem guilty, but a basic inauthenticity, a kind of predisposition to bad faith in our understanding of ourselves and of the world. It implies a determined willfulness in trying to make things be other than they are in order that we may be able to make them subserve, at any moment, to our individual desire for pleasure or for power. But since things do not obey our arbitrary impulsions, and since we cannot make the world correspond to and confirm the image of it dictated by our needs and illusions, our willfulness is inseparable from error and from suffering. Hence, Buddhism says, deluded life itself is in a state of Dukkha, and every movement of desire tends to bear ultimate fruit in pain rather than lasting joy, in hate rather than love, in destruction rather than creation. (Let us note in passing that when technological skill seems in fact to give man almost absolute power in manipulating the world, this fact is no way reverses his original condition of brokenness and error but only makes it all the more obvious. We who live in the age of the H-bomb and the extermination camp have reason to reflect on this, though such reflection is a bit unpopular.)”
― Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite

“I sometimes daydream about becoming somebody else. Anybody else. Not me. I imagine how I might lose myself, my old self.”
― James Preller, The Fall

“You breathe into my words & animate them with life. I'd fall from heaven a trillion times over to die in the softness of your paradise.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“God created people, alright? Even if you don’t believe in God, just assume that God created people. Alright. And then the people created a bunch of stuff. Mostly, the stuff was crap. And God was all like, “Wait, what are you doing with all that crap?” And the people immediately got all defensive, like “What? Nothing. It’s our stuff. Why do you care?” And God was trying to be diplomatic and pointed and said, “Alright, but where are you going with that thing? It doesn’t look safe.” And the people rolled their eyes and said, “We’re going out. Who are you, the cops?” And God was all, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, but are you really? That doesn’t look like such a good idea.” And the people were all, “Stop being so overprotective, we’re not children. You created us like fifteen minutes ago.” And God was all, “Fine. Fine. Alright. Alright.” And then the people took all their stuff, mostly crap into the world. And the world, a lot of bad stuff happened to it to be honest. And then God mumbled, “Told you.” But did the people then stop and say, “Oops. Our bad.” No. The people immediately turned to God and looked incredibly upset and cried, “Why didn’t you stop us? You could have stopped us. Now this is your fault!” Get it? Because that’s our nature, us humans.”
― Fredrik Backman

“Only, as has been said, in all things we ought to renounce our own will so as to attain the goal God has set for us and to pursue whatever He wishes. Unless we do this we can never be saved. For since Adam's transgression we are all subject to the passions because of our constant association with them. We do not gladly pursue goodness, nor do we long for the knowledge of God, nor do we do good out of love, as the dispassionate do; instead we cling to our passions and our vices and do not aspire at all to do what is good unless constrained by the fear of punishment.”
― St. Peter of Damascus

“When Adam and Eve bit into the fruit, therefore, they weren’t just violating some arbitrary command, “Don’t eat the fruit.” They were doing something much sadder and much more serious. They were rejecting God’s authority over them and declaring their independence from him. Adam and Eve wanted to be, as the Serpent promised them, “like God,” so both of them seized on what they thought was an opportunity to shed the vice-regency and take the crown itself. In all the universe, there was only one thing God had not placed under Adam’s feet—God himself. Yet Adam decided this arrangement was not good enough for him, and so he rebelled.”
― Greg Gilbert, What Is the Gospel?

“Als ich eines Tages auf einer Restaurantterrasse Hummer ass und ein Bettler mich belästigte, rief ich den Wirt, um ihn fortjagen zu lassen, und zollte der Rede dieses Rechtsvollstreckers laut Beifall, als er sagte: "Sie stören. Versetzen Sie sich doch gefälligst ein bisschen in die Lage dieser Herrschaften!”
― Albert Camus

“We once had a divine hemisphere, a hemisphere that linked us to the heavens. As the left hemisphere became more and more powerful, it suppressed the right hemisphere and the gods fell silent and finally departed. They abandoned us, humanity said. In fact, we abandoned them. Humanity has still not recovered from their loss. We disconnected ourselves from the numinous order and became mundane. We elevated he profane over the sacred and became hollow, empty and soulless. The world is miserable. Just look around you. Just look at yourself.”
― Steve Madison, When the Universe Spoke to Humanity: Humanity Before the Fall

“[Mark] often took expressions from real life and made them feel like dialogue:
“See ya mate!”
“Yeah. See ya mate.”
He overheard sentences and made them feel like poetry:
“Nobody has ever called me Sir in my entire life.”
Fall songs are often script-like. When writing a script the aim is to form those images and ideas into words then turn those back into a visual medium, by performing and filming them. With Mark's songs he achieved that, too, by richly describing the scene, the images would unfold in the listener's mind.”
― Graham Duff, The Otherwise

“I ask if he has any potential stories in mind.
“Sorry Graham, I've not done me prep,” he then clears his throat. “I did have an idea for one called ‘The Death of Standards’.”
I'm thrilled by the fact he already has a title for it. And what a title! He goes on to outline the bare bones of a story about a woman who works in local government. On her drive to work she perpetrates a hit and run. Upon arriving at the office, she rants to her staff about how hit and run drivers should be executed. Then members of her staff start behaving in the same odd manner: performing terrible acts then raging against those very acts. This sounds exactly like something I'd love to watch.”
― Graham Duff, The Otherwise

“The Spinning Year by Stewart Stafford

Warm days, leaves of green,
Winter's looming touch between,
Harvesting in chill of night,
Spiders crawl in roused delight.

Rearranging the hibernacle,
My living quarter tabernacle,
To see out the darkened months,
Until come Spring's timed shunts.

Emerge into a world of change,
Earth's mother hand will rearrange,
Another tree ring sagely earned,
See around a new corner turned.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford