Ria > Ria's Quotes

“Give up all the wild ideas that buzz round you like wasps. Or like bluebottles. […] Find a nice, ordinary girl, not too attractive or you’ll be jealous all the time, not too bright or you’ll be anxious all the time, not too rich or you’ll have nothing to strive for, not too original or she’ll upset people. There are plenty of them, and all of them are available to a young postman like you. Those are the terms offered.”

The terrier had come to a sudden standstill, as if he had been a white gun dog on one of the estates.

“You don’t live like that,” said Robin from the bed.

“I don’t live at all,” replied Rosetta. “Haven’t you realized?”

“Perhaps I have.” Now Robin was staring at her: momentarily still that muggy evening; for seconds rigid as the dog.

Rosetta smiled. “I am the person every postman meets in the end.”

“I’m a provisional postman only. I told you that clearly,” remarked Robin, starting once more to relax.

“Do what I tell you. What else is there for you? Only wasps and bluebottles.”
― Robert Aickman

“You may look back on your life and accept it as good or evil. But it is far, far harder to admit that you have been completely unimportant; that in the great sum of things all a man's endless grapplings are no more significant than the scuttlings of a cockroach. The universe is neither friendly nor hostile. It is merely indifferent. This makes me ecstatic. I have reached a nirvana of negativity. I can look futility in the face and still see promise in the stars.”
― Sebastian Horsley

“Happiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go on and on ambushing you, presumably until you die.”
― M. John Harrison, Signs of Life

“Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
― Ray Bradbury

“no subject of study is more important than reading…all other intellectual powers depend on it.”
― Jacques Barzun

“The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.”
― Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present

“To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.”
― Jacques Barzun, The Energies of Art: Studies of Authors, Classic and Modern

“Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.”
― JACQUES BARZUN

“When the suicide arrived at the sky, the people there asked him: "Why?" He replied: "Because no one admired me.”
― Stephen Crane, The Complete Poems of Stephen Crane

“I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.”
― Angela Carter

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.”
― George MacDonald

“Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly.”
― George MacDonald

“To try to be brave is to be brave.”
― George MacDonald

“It was night. There was a drizzle, so Emily's black Japanese umbrella was up. The two were close beneath it, walking in long strides, beautiful, sinister-looking lovers, narrow squared shoulders in dark coats. A tall pickup truck sped by and a was a phlem struck the edge of the pavement near where they were walking. Emily raised a finger, cocked her thumb, and said, "Bang."

"Got the left rear tire." said Anthony.

"The truck rolled," she added, "and burst into flames."

"He's still alive," said Anthony, "climbing out of the broken rear window, his hair and clothes ablaze, screaming for help."

"Punky boys come and piss on him," said Emily.

The discussion was very quiet, very earnest.

"They put out the fire from his burning body," said Anthony, "but he dies later in the burn ward."

"His family is relieved and happy," said Emily with stunning finality.

Twenty-four hours later the spitting driver dies on a suburban highway near his home, his pickup spinning out of control on black ice, the vehicle exploding into flame. Anthony and Emily never know about it, never guess a connection to their curse, having never thought of him a second time.”
― Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Anthony Shriek

“The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call “the trouble with you.” Nevertheless, the journey is worth making.”
― Quentin Crisp

“You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.”
― Quentin Crisp

“Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?”
― Quentin Crisp

“I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches — and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It’s still going on.”
― Philip Pullman

“When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“Imagination is a form of seeing”
― Phillip Pullman

“It snowed right before Jack stopped talking to Hazel, fluffy white flakes big enough to show their crystal architecture, like perfect geometric poems.”
― Anne Ursu, Breadcrumbs

“Everything was so quiet, as if the silence was listening.”
― Anna Kavan

“A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.”
― Lord Dunsany

“You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it.”
― Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

“She was beautiful, in the quiet way that lonely, unnoticed people are beautiful to those who notice them.”
― Jedediah Berry

“She kept looking at Gideon with the screwed-up eyes of someone who had been handed an egg for safekeeping and was surrounded by egg-hunting snakes.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“Attach yourself to truth, not to me. For I may die before you, but the truth will accompany you to your death.”
― David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus

“Where do you come from?"

"From the planet of a distant sun, called Earth."

"What for?"

"I was tired of vulgarity.”
― David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus