The Star Rover Quotes

“To be able to forget means sanity.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel. ”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“No; I did not hate him. The word is too weak. There is no word in the language strong enough to describe my feelings. I can say only that I knew the gnawing of a desire for vengeance on him that was a pain in itself and that exceeded all the bounds of language. ”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“Always has woman crouched close to earth like a partridge hen mothering her young; always has my wantonness of roving led me out on the shining ways; and always have my star paths returned me to her, the figure everlasting, the woman, the one woman, for whose arms I had such need that clasped in them I have forgotten the stars.

For her I accomplished Odysseys scaled mountains crossed deserts; for her I led the hunt and was forward in battle; and for her end' to her I sang my songs of the things I had done. All ecstasies of life and rhapsodies of delight have been mine because of her. And here, at the end, I can say that I have known no sweeter, deeper madness of being than to drown in the fragrant glory and forgetfulness of her hair.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“There is such a thing as anesthesia of pain, engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne. ”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“Morrell, ever a true comrade, too had a splendid brain. In fact, and I who am about to die have the right to say it without incurring the charge of immodesty, the three best minds in San Quentin from the Warden down were the three that rotted there together in solitary. And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have known of life, I am compelled to the conclusion that strong minds are never docile. The stupid men, the fearful men, the men ungifted with passionate rightness and fearless championship - these are the men who make model prisoners. I thank all gods that Jake Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and I were not model prisoners.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“I could never live out completely one full experience, one point of consciousness in time and space. My dreams, if dreams they may be called, were rhymeless and reasonless.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“I trod interstellar space, exalted by the knowledge that I was bound on vast adventure, where, at the end, I would find all the cosmic formulae and have made clear to me the ultimate secret of the universe. In my hand I carried a long glass wand. It was borne in upon me that with the tip of this wand I must touch each star in passing. And I knew, in all absoluteness, that did I but miss one star I should be precipitated into some unplummeted abyss of unthinkable and eternal punishment and guilt”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“But remember, my reader, whom I hope to have travel far with me through time and space remember, please, my reader, that I have thought much on these matters that through bloody nights and sweats of dark that lasted years long I have been alone with my many selves to consult and contemplate my many selves.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“After the dark I shall live again, and there will be women. The future holds the little women for me in the lives I am yet to live. And though the stars drift, and the heavens lie, ever remains woman, resplendent, eternal, the one woman, as I, under all my masquerades and misadventures, am the one man, her mate”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. I am all that that man was and did become. I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest, making rude tools of stone and bone, building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with leaves and straw, domesticating the wild grasses and meadow roots, fathering them to become the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and barley and all manner of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to store, beating out the fibers of plants to spin into thread and to weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making markets and trade routes, building boats, and founding navigation—ay, and organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“If only I were articulate to paint in the frail medium of words what I see and know and possess incorporated in my consciousness of the mighty driftage of the races in the times before our present written history began!”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“It is life that is the reality and the mystery. Life is vastly different from mere chemic matter fluxing in high modes of motion. Life persists. Life is the thread of fire that persists through all the modes of matter. I know. I am life. I have lived ten thousand generations. I have lived millions of years. I have possessed many bodies. I, the possessor of these many bodies, have persisted. I am life. I am the unquenched spark ever flashing and astonishing the face of time, ever working my will and wreaking my passion on the cloddy aggregates of matter, called bodies, which I have transiently inhabited.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“Still more. When I was three, and four, and five years of age, I was not yet I. I was a mere becoming, a flux of spirit not yet cooled solid in the mold of my particular flesh and time and place. In that period all that I had ever been in ten thousand lives before strove in me, and troubled the flux of me, in the effort to incorporate itself in me and become me.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“I chanced the chest and the slow-beating heart. The quick compulsion of my will was rewarded. I no longer had chest nor heart. I was only a mind, a soul, a consciousness—call it what you will—incorporate in a nebulous brain that, while it still centered inside my skull, was expanded, and was continuing to expand, beyond my skull.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“I had lone, schooled myself to be oblivious to pain. I had neither doubts nor fears. All the content of my mind seemed to be an absolute faith in the overlordship of the mind. This passivity was almost dream-like, and yet, in its way, it was positive almost to a pitch of exaltation.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“this finger is not I.  Cut it off.  I live.  The body is mutilated.  I am not mutilated.  The spirit that is I is whole.”
― Jack London, The Jacket

“We fight best, and die best, and live best, for what we love.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“Oh, make no mistake. I am no callow, ardent youth. I am an elderly man, broken in health and body, and soon to die. I am a scientist and a philosopher. I, as all the generations of philosophers before me, know woman for what she is—her weaknesses and meannesses and immodesties and ignobilities, her earth-bound feet and her eyes that have never seen the stars. But—and the everlasting, irrefragable fact remains: Her feet are beautiful, her eyes are beautiful, her arms and breasts are paradise, her charm is potent beyond all charm that has ever dazzled man; and, as the pole willy nilly draws the needle, just so, willy nilly, does she draw man.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“So here was my predicament: I knew that within myself was a Golconda of memories of other lives, yet I was unable to do more than flit like a madman through those memories. I had my Golconda but could not mine it.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“We, helpless infants in arms or creeping quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed our dreams of air flight. Yes; and we endured the torment and torture of nightmare fears of dim and monstrous things. We newborn infants, without experience, were born with fear, with memory of fear; and memory is experience.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“If looks could kill I should have been a dead man that day.  Openly they spat at sight of me, and, everywhere arose snarls and cries.”
― Jack London, The Jacket

“What we wanted to do we went and did, on our legs upstanding, and we faced all reproof and censure on our legs upstanding, and did not hide behind the skirts of classical economists and bourgeois philosophers, nor behind the skirts of subsidized preachers, professors, and editors.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“И още нещо, когато съм бил на три, на четири и на пет години, още не съм бил аз. Бил съм нещо, което тепърва се оформя, непрекъснато променящ се дух, незастинал още в калъпа на отредената ми плът, и време, и място. В този период, всичко което съм бил в десетте хиляди живота преди, се е борило и е вълнувало този променящ се дух в усилието да се въплати в мен, за да стана това което съм.”
― Джек Лондон, The Star Rover

“We new-born infants, without experience, were born with fear, with memory of fear; and memory is experience.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“Sen beni sevmiyorsun," dedi yavaşça ve sözcüklerle anlatılamayacak denli derin ve engin bir davet, giderek yavaşça büyüdü.
"Öyle görünüyor ki, seni senin kavrayışının da ötesinde seviyorum ben," oldu karşılığım. "Seni sevmekten onur duyuyorum, çünkü biliyorum ki seni sevmeyi ve senin bana verebileceğin tüm sevgiyi hak ediyorum. Ama Roma benim üvey annem ve eğer ona ihanet edersem sana duyduğum aşkım onursuz ve değersiz hale gelirdi.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“mais do que um grão de verdade no erro contido na definição infantil de memória: memória é a coisa com a qual a gente esquece. Ser capaz de esquecer significa sanidade. Lembrar incessantemente significa”
― Jack London, O Andarilho das Estrelas

“The woman factor explains many things of men.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover