Theodore Cannon > Theodore's Quotes

“O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus, L’été

“What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity…”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“When a boy… discovers that he is more given into introspection and consciousness of self than other boys his age, he easily falls into the error of believing it is because he is more mature than they. This was certainly a mistake in my case. Rather, it was because the other boys had no such need of understanding themselves as I had: they could be their natural selves, whereas I was to play a part, a fact that would require considerable understanding and study. So it was not my maturity but my sense of uneasiness, my uncertainty that was forcing me to gain control over my consciousness. Because such consciousness was simply a steppingstone to aberration and my present thinking was nothing but uncertain and haphazard guesswork.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“Come here, image.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus

“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.”
― Albert Camus

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
― Albert Camus

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

“Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.”
― Albert Camus

“I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“Some people were born just so they could be buried.”
― Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time

“Unless he had whiskey running through his veins, Willard came to the clearing every morning and evening to talk to God. Arvin didn't know which was worse, the drinking or the praying. As far back as he could remember, it seemed that his father had fought the Devil all the time.”
― Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time

“Some people were born just so they could be buried; his mother was like that, and he’d always”
― Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time

“Let me pray first," he sobbed. He started to put his hands together.

"I already did it for you," Arvin said. "Put in one of them special requests you fuckers are always talking about, asked Him to send you straight to hell.”
― Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time

“There's no way to turn back now, he thought. But he couldn't go on like this either. He imagined the door to a sad, empty room closing with a faint click, never to be opened again, and that calmed him a little.”
― Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time

“He raised his eyes and searched out a small patch of blue sky visible through the dense, green branches of the pines. A white wisp of cloud drifted by. That's what dying will be like, he told himself. Just floating up in the air. Nothing bad about that. He smiled a little.”
― Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time

“Arvin needs to have somewhere he can always call home," she told Willard. "I never did have that.”
― Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time

“I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer