All Quotes

"There’s too much chance for shock. And yet I must tell her the truth. A doctor gets nowhere by lying to his patient."

"You’re a has-been that never was. And you’re going to stay that way, spoiled and narcissistic and small and mean and rotten."

"“You move against my ethics,” said the priest. “A drowning man clutches at anything,” said Nolan, “and ethics may drown with him if that’s what he grabs instead of a life belt.”"

"“Off the mount, Nolan,” said the priest, “and enough of the sermon. What’s your point?”"

"I have hit forty, forty has hit me, like a locomotive."

"He knew that most machines are amoral, neither bad nor good. But by the way you built and shaped them you in turn shaped men, women, and children to be bad or good. A car, for instance, dead brute, unthinking, an unprogrammed bulk, is the greatest destroyer of souls in history. It makes boy-men greedy for power, destruction, and more destruction. It was never intended to do that. But that's how it turned out."

"And though the debate may run another hundred thousand years: What is Love? perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to us. Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering, handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we had dared to hope or dream..."

"She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory—you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he’s all out of kilter."

"But all the little inside-people sitting around in her head would rock back in their tiny rockers and cackle and say, “You ain’t foolin’ us none, Grandma.”"

"Oh, oh. Here he comes, Moses crossing a Black Sea of bile."

"You know and I know, I am Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, on my way to Eternity with a dead flashlight and no candles."

"Some laugh, some cry, some bang the world with fists, some run, but it all sums up the same: they make do. The world swarms with people, each one drowning, but each swimming a different stroke to the far shore."

"The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years. Way off in that direction: silence. Way off in that direction: hush. It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here. Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were."

"In sum, my contact lenses had made me fifteen years old again. That is: festering, self-crucified bundle of doubt, horror, and absolute imperfection. The worst age in all one’s life had returned to haunt me with its pimpled, bumpy ghost."

"I am a beautiful woman. I have been beautiful all of my life. Which means that from the start people lied because they simply wished to be with me. I grew up surrounded by the untruths of men, women, and children who could not risk my displeasure. When beauty pouts, the world trembles. Have you ever seen a beautiful woman surrounded by men, seen them nodding, nodding? Heard their laughter? Men will laugh at anything a beautiful woman says. Hate themselves, yes, but they will laugh, say no for yes and yes for no."

"And then, the stars came out. It was like that first night of childhood when his father had taken him out beyond the city to a hill where the lights could not diminish the Universe. And there were a thousand, no ten thousand, no ten million billion stars filling the darkness. The stars were manifold and bright, and they did not care. Even then he had known: they do not care. If I breathe or do not breathe, live or die, the eyes that look from all around don’t care."

"It’s big, it’s broad… It’s broad, it’s bright… It fills the sky of All Hallow’s Night… The strangest sight you’ve ever seen. The Monster Tree on Halloween."

"The scythe fell and lay in the grass like a lost smile."

"The days of the Long Cold are done. Because of this one brave, new-thinking man, summer lives in the winter cave."

"O autumn winds that bake and burn And all the world to darkness turn, Now storm and seize and make of me… A swarm of leaves from Autumn’s Tree!"

"“What’s happening, Mr. Moundshroud? Where are we?” Moundshroud struck a flinty finger into fire and held it up. “Why, bless me, boys. It’s the Dark Ages. The longest darkest night ever.”"

"Mr. Moundshroud, who are YOU? And Mr. Moundshroud, way up there on the roof, sent his thoughts back: I think you know, boy, I think you know. Will we meet again, Mr. Moundshroud? Many years from now, yes, I’ll come for you. And a last thought from Tom: O Mr. Moundshroud, will we EVER stop being afraid of nights and death? And the thought returned: When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die."

"Oh come, please come, to the Poor Mouth Fair Where the Saints kneel round in their underwear And say out prayers that most need saying For needful sinners who've forgotten praying; And in every alcove and niche you spy The living dead who envy the long since gone Who never wished to die."

"And from above a voice fused half in iron Half in irony gives man a dreadful choice. The role is his, it says, Man makes and loads his own strange dice, They sum at his behest, He dooms himself. He is his own sad jest. Let go? Let be? Why do you ask this gift from Me? When, trussed and bound and nailed, You sacrifice your life, your liberty You hang yourself upon the tenterhook. Pull free!"

"You make to die You are the dead You the assassin of yourself."

"You are the jailer and the jailed, You the impaler and the one that your own Million-fleshed self in dreams by night do hold in thrall and now at noon must kill."

"Why have you been so blind? Why have you never seen? The slave and master in one skin Is all your history, no more, no less, Confess! This is what you've been."

"The crowd upon the cross gives anguished roar; A moment terrible to hear."

"Man warring on himself an old tale is; But Man discovering the source of all his sorrow in himself, Finding his left hand and his right Are similar sons, are children fighting In the porchyards of the void?!"

"That so much time was wasted in this pain. Ten thousand years ago he might have let off down To not return again! A dreadful laugh at last escapes his lips; The laughter sets him free. A Fool lives in the Universe! he cries. The Fool is me! And with one final shake of laughter Breaks his bonds. The nails fall skittering to marble floors. And Christ, knelt at the rail, sees miracle As Man steps down in amiable wisdom To give himself what no one else can give: His liberty."

"Trapped in the blood, athirst for air, Christ, who once was employed as single Son of God Now finds Himself among three billion on a billion Brother sons, their arms thrown wide to grasp and hold and walk them everywhere Now weaving this, now weaving that in swoons…"

"Ten thousand times a million sons of sons move Through one great and towering town Wearing their wits, which means their laughter, As their crown. Set free upon the earth By simple gifts of knowing how mere mirth can cut the bonds And pull the blood spikes out; Their conversation shouts of "Fool!""

"A single face turned upward toward all Time One flesh, one ecstasy, one peace."

"I am the dreamer and the doer I the hearer and the knower I the giver and the taker I the sword and the wound of sword. If this be true, then let sword fall free from hand. I embrace myself. I laugh until I weep And weep until I smile…"

"Leave off losings, and take on winnings, Erase all mortal ends, give birth to only new beginnings, In a billion years of morning and a billion years of sleep."

"“Recant!” Create a voice “confess and recant! Recant!” “There is nothing to confess, therefore no need for recantation,” said the old man quietly."

"How sad. The city unwrapped you like a candy bar and ate you all up. You’re nothing but a dusty milk bottle left on a tenement porch, a spider building a nest across the top. Traffic din pounded your marrow to dust. Subway sucked your breath like a cat sucks the soul of a babe. Vacuum cleaners got your brain. Alcohol dissolved the rest. Typewriters and computers took your final dregs in and out their tripes, printed you on paper, punched you in confettis, threw you down a sewer vent. TV scribbled you in nervous tics on old ghost screens. Your final bones will be carried off by a big angry bulldog crosstown bus holding you munched in its big rubber-lipped mouth door."

"God gives us dreadful gifts. The most dreadful of all is memory."

"You’re not God, are you? You don’t look like him."

"A few days before the picnic, he had found a photograph of his father twenty-five years younger, standing with a group of friends at college. The photograph had disturbed him, made him aware as he had not been before of the passing of time, the swift flow of the years away from youth. A picture taken of him as he was now would, in twenty-five years, look as strange to his own children as his father’s picture did to him—unbelievably young, a stranger out of a strange, never-returning time."

"The weather said it had been here forever, man was hardly here at all, and would soon be gone."

"“I didn’t mean…” said laughing. “Nobody means, but everybody says, and luckily I got the hide of an iguana.”"

"Kid, don’t tell us what we should be when you don’t even know what we are."

"He struck off into the forest, idly, drawn steadily by a sound that was large enough to fill the universe, the sound of a river going somewhere and not caring; the most beautiful sound of all."

"He waked through the green forest and listened to the various silences there. Not one silence, but several; the silence that the moss made underfoot, the silence the shadows made depending from the trees, the silence of small streams exploring tiny countries on all sides as he came into a clearing."

"“Watch your liver!” said his mother. “Is that a threat, or a toast?” said his father."

"I felt that killing wrench men feel when beauty passes and will not pass again. You want to cry out: Stay. I love you. But you do not speak. And the summer walks away in her flesh, never to return."

"“You go against the letter of the law!” “No,” explained the priest, calmly, “we but shift the punctuation, cross new t’s, dot new i’s.”"

"Whole town out there is up to their earholes in watchsprings, no hands on the clocks, afraid to get up every morning and find it’s always always and forever Sunday!"

"Q: How many times have people attempted to ban your work? RB: Very rarely, occasionally by little frogs in little puddles. It’s never anything serious. This comes up in any society where people have different opinions. You’re a Catholic and I’m a Baptist and we may have problems. If you’re a homosexual and I’m heterosexual, we may have problems. You’re black and I’m white. You’ve got all these differences and people get sensitive and they want to change all the books. And you have to tell them to go sit down somewhere."