Been Quotes (page 261)
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I'm an educated man: the prisons I know are subtle ones. And of course poetry and prison have always been neighbors. And yet it's melancholia that's the source of my attraction. Am I in the seventh dream or have I truly heard the cocks crow at the other end of the feria? It might be one thing or it might be another. But cocks crow at dawn, and it's noon now, according to my watch. I wander through the feria and greet my colleagues who are wandering as dreamily as I am. Dreamily dreamily = a...
Roberto Bolano
If you ever loved anything in your life, try to remember it. If you ever betrayed anything, pretend for a moment that you have been forgiven. If you ever feared anything, pretend for an instant that those days are gone and will never return. Buy the lie and hold to it for as long as you can. Press your familiar, whatever its name, to your breast and stroke it till it purrs.
Roger Zelazny
Love We Must Part. Love, we must part now: do not let it be. Calamitous and bitter. In the past. There has been too much moonlight and self-pity: Let us have done with it: for now at last. Never has sun more boldly paced the sky, Never were hearts more eager to be free, To kick down worlds, lash forests; you and INo longer hold them; we are husks, that see. The grain going forward to a different use. There is regret. Always, there is regret. But it is better that our lives unloose, As two...
Philip Larkin
In the end, the problem was not grief. Grief was the first cause, perhaps, but it soon gave way to something else - something more tangible, more calculable in its effects, more violent in the damage it produced. A whole chain of forces had been set in motion, and at a certain point I began to wobble, to fly in greater and greater circles around myself, until at last I spun out of orbit.
Paul Auster
It would have been difficult to say what was the nature of this look, and whence proceeded the flame that flashed from it. It was a fixed gaze, which was, nevertheless, full of trouble and tumult. And, from the profound immobility of his whole body, barely agitated at intervals by an involuntary shiver, as a tree is moved by the wind; from the stiffness of his elbows, more marble than the balustrade on which they leaned; or the sight of the petrified smile which contracted his face? one would...
Victor Hugo
Ah, well..." I started to say, and then stopped. So that was where he was going; I'd heard it before. Richard had told me that I'd not been standing in my mother's shoes in 1942, when I was born; he'd said I couldn't, or shouldn't, judge her. It was my not forgiving her that irked him-it was my intolerance of her intolerance that bugged him.
John Irving
When making his music, he [Elvis Presley] had been the essence of cool, but in his movies he was often a self-parody embarrassing to watch. Colonel Parker, his manager, who had picked movie scrips for him, had served Elvis less well than the monk Rasputin had served Czar Nicholas and Alexandra.
Dean Koontz
Overall, it seems now possible to draw a reasonably good explanation of why the human condition is a singularity, why the likes of it has occurred only once and took so long in coming. The reason is simply the extreme improbability of the preadaptations necessary for it to occur at all. Each of the evolutionary steps has been a full-blown adaptation in its own right. Each has required a particular sequence of one or more preadaptations that occurred previously. Homo sapiens is the only...
E. O. Wilson
The voyage from San Francisco to Hawaii had been the most terrifying experience Greer and Cameron had ever gone through, even more terrible than the time they shot a deputy sheriff in Idaho ten times and he wouldn't die and Greer finallyhad to say to the deputy sheriff,"Please die because we don't want toshoot you again". And the deputy sheriff had said, "Ok, I'll die, but don't shoot me again"."We won't shoot you again", Cameron had said."Ok, I'm dead", and he was.
Richard Brautigan
The desert landscape is always at its best in the half-light of dawn or dusk. The sense of distance lacks: a ridge nearby can be a far-off mountain range, each small detail can take on the importance of a major variant on the countryside's repetitious theme. The coming of day promises a change; it is only when the day had fully arrived that the watcher suspects it is the same day returned once again--the same day he has been living for a long time, over and over, still blindingly bright and...
Paul Bowles
