Chris > Chris's Quotes

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
― James Baldwin

“There’s folks you just don’t need. You’re better off without em. Your life is just a little better because they ain’t in it.”
― William Gay

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”
― Harvey Pekar

“Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”
― Wilfred Owen, The War Poems

“Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Fate

“Going outside is highly overrated.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
― E.E. Cummings

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
― Robert Frost

“That was all I needed when she smiled at me, all the other stupid, ugly stuff just drifted away.”
― Charles Burns, Black Hole

“The real trick is how and why we continue surviving at all.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“He punched and thrashed around as he lay in his coffin and he felt his leg swinging in unnatural ways and his knuckles ached with the blood and bruises from trying to fight his way out.”
― Chris Cummings, Shards

“They parted and she never looked back. He never called her name. The busy doorway became quieter and quieter as he stood there, waiting for her plane to leave. He dried his face with the back of his hands and sniffed a harsh breath of air into his lungs. If he closed his eyes, he could still imagine her beside him. If he never opened them, she would always be there.”
― Chris Cummings, Shards

“The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.”
― Poppy Z. Brite

“What he wanted, he had realized in the last few minutes, was everything. He wanted the rest of her life, and failing that, he wanted permission to walk along beside her while she lived it.”
― William Gay, Provinces of Night

“Hold tight to the world and do not let go and do not fuck this up.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.

So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me. Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“A reader lives many lives,” James Harris said. “The person who doesn’t read lives but one. But if you’re happy just doing what you’re told and reading what other people think you should read, then don’t let me stop you. I just find it sad.”
― Grady Hendrix, The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

“Creativity needs time. We’re all dying. Fuck stagnation. High-five creation.”
― Chuck Wendig

“Anyway the trick to life is, if you don’t like what is happening, go back to sleep until it stops.”
― Catriona Ward, The Last House on Needless Street

“I've found that there is always some beauty left -- in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Good and evil coexist in the worst of times. It is then when hope shines through.”
― Heather Morrisová, The Tattooist of Auschwitz

“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“There is pain in every almost.”
― Stephen King, Fairy Tale

“Adults are bad at remembering how powerful they can be because somewhere along the line, they were shamed for their imagination.”
― Stephen Chbosky, Imaginary Friend

“Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Stories and Poems