Joshua Pray > Joshua's Quotes

“I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?”
― William Shakespeare, Henry V

“Art is a barren route, of which glory is the oasis.”
― Henri Murger, The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter: Scenes de la Vie de Boheme

“He had never felt anything like that before - yet somehow he knew that from now on he would always feel like that, always, and something caught at his throat as he realized what a strange sad adventure life might get to be, strange and sad and still much more beautiful and amazing than he could ever have imagined because it was so really, strangely sad.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City

“A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game

“The dead do not need to rise. They are a part of the earth now and the earth can never be conquered. For the earth endureth forever. It will outlive all systems of tyranny. Those who have entered it honorably, and no men ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Study is the child of silence and mystery.”
― Henri Murger, The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter: Scenes de la Vie de Boheme

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. ”
― William S. Burroughs

“Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than sleep in a comfortable bed unfree.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either.”
― Robert Graves

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.”
― John Dos Passos

“I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.”
― John Dos Passos

“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
― Howard Zinn

“Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.”
― Howard Zinn

“Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.”
― Edward Abbey

“Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.”
― Naomi Klein

“Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within the span of his little life by him who interests his heart in everything.”
― Laurence Sterne

“She looked just like a painting dying to speak.”
― Aeschylus, Agamemnon

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Solitude was my only consolation - deep, dark, deathlike solitude.”
― Mary W. Shelley

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever, and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America

“All evil is born from ignorance. Yet writers have illuminated the world, chasing away the darkness.”
― Ross King

“Never in her life – she could swear it from the bottom of her soul – had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgments had come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“This went on at any odd hour, if necessary, with a floor rug over his shoulders, with the fine quiet of the scholar which is nearest of all things to heavenly peace”
― F Scott Fitzgerald, TENDER IS THE NIGHT With an introduction by Charles Scriner III and illustrations by Fred Meyer.

“We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
― Howard Zinn

“...it is the business of myth to condense and contain the most fundamental sources of cultural tension -- those areas in which the self and the world are in greatest friction -- and to validate current ideologies by dramatizing them and retrojecting their contours into the past.”
― R.M. Liuzza, Beowulf

“What though the field be lost?
All is not Lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And the courage never to submit or yeild.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost