Quote collection
40 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The Zoo is a prison for animals who have been sentenced without trial and I feel guilty because I do nothing about it. But there it was, I wanted to see an oyster-catcher and I was no better than the people who'd caged oyster-catchers for me to see."
"Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone."
"There must be a lot of people in the world being wondered about by people who don't see them anymore."
"Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history."
"After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?"
"But when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living. I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself."
"Words have a life; without response they die."
"What a weird thing smoking is and I can't stop it. I feel cosy, have a sense of well-being when I'm smoking, poisoning myself, killing myself slowly. Not so slowly maybe. I have all kinds of pains I don't want to know about and I know that's what they're from. But when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living. I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself."
"Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn't in us. It's almost as if were put here on earth to show how silly they aren't."
"There are situations in life to which the only satisfactory response is a physically violent one. If you don't make that response, you continually relive the unresolved situation over and over in your life."
"When you suffer an attack of nerves you're being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system?."
"Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. It’s a relation of self to the moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it’s no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are too early for most things, and most of life has to go by before it’s time for almost anything and too late for almost nothing. Nothing to lose, the present moment to gain, the integration with long-delayed Now."
"Them as counts counts moren them as dont count"
"More and more I'm aware that the permutations are not unlimited."
"An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do."
"I believe that most of us would like to be thought well of by horses."
"And now it seems she's on my wavelength. That's all I need. My mind isn't much of a comfort to me but at least I thought it was private."
"An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of; we blind them as quickly as possible."
"Explorers have to be ready to die lost."
"The things that matter don't necessarily make sense."