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Tag Archives: quotes

To be a Strange Old Man Also

“I’ll kill him though,” he said. “In all his greatness and his glory.” Although it is unjust, he thought. But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures. “I told the boy I was a strange old man,” he said. “Now is when I must prove it.” The thousand [...]

My Bus will be Pulled by Geese

Your destination is North. The map that you are using is a mirror. You are always pulling the bits out of your bare feet, the pieces of the map that broke off and fell on the ground as the Snow Queen flew overhead in her sleigh. Where you are, where you are coming from, it [...]

Snake’s-hands

Path is like a snake, it curls around the whole of Little Belaire with its head in the middle and the tip of its tail by Buckle cord’s door, but only someone who knows Little Belaire can see where it runs. To someone else, it would seem to run off in all directions. So when [...]

And then went down to the ship

And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. [...]

Judge All These in a Room Together

Being aware of the history of literature—or of any other art, for that matter—is really a form of unbelieving, a form of skepticism. If I say to my self, for example, that Wordsworth and Verlaine were very good nineteenth-century poets, then I may fall into the danger of thinking that time has some how destroyed [...]

Fiction of the Untrammeled Imagination

The first thing to say about J.G. Ballard is not that he is among our finest writers of science fiction but that he is among our finest writers of fiction tout court period. Ballard himself might retort that, granted the first claim, the second is redundant, since the only important fiction being produced today is [...]

In Which A Soldier Describes the Primary Act of War

It’s not the first man. It’s the second and third and fourth and fifth; and they all become that first man. And by the fiftieth, and at close range, they all become the same face. When you kill, you kill the same guy over and over and over again. —Samuel Fuller, quoted in The Typewriter, [...]

The Age of the Shrug

Jessica saw the shrug, thought, This is the age of the shrug. [...] Our civilization could well die of indifference within it before succumbing to external attack. — Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

We are of two different kinds…

“I am one of those who like to stay late at the café,” the older waiter said. “With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.” — Ernest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

In Which Mr McCarthy Speaks

Some quotes from Cormac McCarthy, in this interview with The Wall Street Journal. Mr McCarthy says: Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, [...]