Prologue Quotes
62 quotes
"Steal love's sweet bait from fearful hooks."
"Acontece tener un padre un hijo feo y sin gracia alguna, y el amor que le tiene le pone una venda en los ojos para que no vea sus faltas, antes las juzga por discreciones y lindezas y las cuenta a sus amigos por agudezas y donaires."
"...estás en tu casa, donde eres señor della, como el rey de sus alcabalas."
"And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity."
"I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a "because," but rather an "in order to.""
"Let us go on committing suicide by working among our people, and let them dream life just as the lake dreams the sky."
"One of those leaders of what they call the social revolution has said that religion is the opiate of the people. Opium...opium...opium, yes. Let us give them opium so that they can sleep and dream."
"They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger. And then it was over."
"See? My last smoke. It's bad for the baby."
"Shoot 'em fulla holes, blow 'em to bits, vaporize 'em, disintegrate 'em, no matter whatchu do, they'll still be back, good as new."
"Take me to Cold Steel."
"I was in a graphic novel. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of."
"I was in a computer game. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of."
"Du grosses Gestirn! Was wäre dein Glück, wenn du nicht Die hättest, welchen du leuchtest!"
"The fall of our footsteps ringeth too hollow through their streets. And just as at night, when they are in bed and hear a man abroad long before sunrise, so they ask themselves concerning us: Where goeth the thief? Go not to men, but stay in the forest! Go rather to the animals! Why not be like me- a bear amongst bears, a bird amongst birds?" "And what doeth the saint in the forest?" asked Zarathustra. The saint answered: "I make hymns and sing them; and in making hymns I laugh and weep and mumble: thus do I praise God. With singing, weeping, laughing, and mumbling do I praise the God who is my God.""
"When Zarathustra was alone, however, he said to his heart: "Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!""
"Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll. Was habt ihr getan, ihn zu überwinden?"
"Ihr habt den Weg vom Wurme zum Menschen gemacht, und Vieles ist in euch noch Wurm. Einst wart ihr Affen, und auch jetzt ist der Mensch mehr Affe, als irgend ein Affe."
"Wahrlich, ein schmutziger Strom ist der Mensch. Man muß schon ein Meer sein, um einen schmutzigen Strom aufnehmen zu können, ohne unrein zu werden."
"What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of your greatest contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becomes loathsome to you, and so also your reason and virtue. The hour when you say: 'What good is my happiness? It is poverty and filth and miserable self-complacency. But my happiness should justify existence itself!' The hour when you say: 'What good is my reason? Does it long for knowledge as the lion for his prey? It is poverty and filth and miserable self-complacency!' The hour when you say: 'What good is my virtue? It has not yet driven me mad! How weary I am of my good and my evil! It is all poverty and filth and miserable self-complacency!' The hour when you say: 'What good is my justice? I do not see that I am filled with fire and burning coals. But the just are filled with fire and burning coals!' The hour when you say: 'What good is my pity? Is not pity the cross on which he is nailed who loves man? But my pity is no crucifixion!""
"Was gross ist am Menschen, das ist, dass er eine Brücke ist und kein Zweck ist."
"I love him whose soul is lavish, who wanteth no thanks and doth not give back: for he always bestoweth, and desireth not to keep for himself."
"Ich sage euch: man muß noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können."
"Kein Hirt und Eine Heerde! Jeder will das Gleiche, Jeder ist gleich: wer anders fühlt, geht freiwillig in's Irrenhaus."
""We have invented happiness," say the last men, and they blink."
"Most of the buildings were pretty wretched; more like shacks; frankly. The house in which Tom lived was the best, though, and in good times might almost have passed for presentable."
"Tom's father had been a doctor and now received a modest pension so it was no great disaster for Tom to drift about not doing anything in particular. Tom was a writer… at any rate by his own lights. Oh, his output as committed to paper was so far limited to the words "great" and "small", followed by a question mark, but nevertheless meticulously archived in one of his many bureau drawers... In order to postpone the time at which he would have to put pen to paper in earnest, Tom had now come up with a series of meetings on moral rearmament with which he felt obliged to benefit the town."
"Jason gave that mutt a bone with meat on it? When did we last see meat? Next time you waste good food I'll take your knife away. Oughta known it was you giv'n meat to eat. Moses was meant to be hungry! To keep watch."
"These are wicked times, Tom Edison. Soon there'll be folks by with even less than us."
"You think they're fine? I don't think so, I think there is a lot this country has forgotten. I just try and refresh folks memory by way of illustration."
"Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth. It has been night for a long time. The hovels that encrust the river’s edge have grown like mushrooms around me in the dark. We rock. We pitch in a deep current."
"Timbers whisper and the wind strokes thatch, walls settle and floors shift to fill space; the tens of houses have become hundreds, thousands; they spread backwards from the banks and shed light from all across the plain. They surround me. They are growing. They are taller and fatter and noisier, their roofs are slate, their walls are strong brick. The river twists and turns to face the city. It looms suddenly, massive, stamped on the landscape. Its light wells up around the surrounds, the rock hills, like bruise-blood. Its dirty towers glow. I am debased. I am compelled to worship this extraordinary presence that has silted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protruding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering, cobbled mazes in the old town, culs-de-sac, sewers riddling the earth like secular sepulchres, a new landscape of wasteground, crushed stone, libraries fat with forgotten volumes, old hospitals, towerblocks, ships and metal claws that lift cargoes from the water. How could we not see this approaching? What trick of topography is this, that lets the sprawling monster hide behind corners to leap out at the traveller? It is too late to flee."
"The rotting buildings lean against each other, exhausted. The river smears slime on its brick banks, city walls risen from the depths to hold the water at bay. There is a vile stink here. (I wonder how this looks from above, no chance for the city to hide then, if you came at it on the wind you would see it from miles and miles away like a dirty smear, like a slab of carrion thronging with maggots, I should not think like this but I cannot stop now, I could ride the updrafts that the chimneys vent, sail high over the proud towers and shit on the earthbound, ride the chaos, alight where I choose, I must not think like this, I must not do this now, I must stop, not now, not this, not yet.)"
"A train whistles as it crosses the river before us on raised tracks. I look to it, to the south and the east, seeing the line of little lights rush away and be swallowed by this nightland, this behemoth that eats its citizens. We will pass the factories soon. Cranes rear from the gloom like spindly birds; here and there they move to keep the skeleton crews, the midnight crews, in their work. Chains swing deadweight like useless limbs, snapping into zombie motion where cogs engage and flywheels turn. Fat predatory shadows prowl the sky. There is a boom, a reverberation, as if the city has a hollow core."
"The water here reflects the stars through a stinking rainbow of impurities, effluents and chymical slop, making it sluggish and unsettling. (Oh, to rise above this to not smell this filth this dirt this dung to not enter the city through this latrine but I must stop, I must, I cannot go on, I must.)"
"My cloak (heavy cloth unfamiliar and painful on my skin) tugs at me and I can feel the weight of my purse. That is what protects me here; that and the illusion I have fostered, the source of my sorrow and my shame, the anguish that has brought me to this great wen, this dusty city dreamed up in bone and brick, a conspiracy of industry and violence, steeped in history and battened-down power, this badland beyond my ken."
"At first, these individuals were known simply as "egg hunters," but this was quickly truncated to the nickname "gunters.""
"He wrote stories about everything he saw, and he saw a lot. He walked through the streets of Brooklyn along the water, or leaned against the store windows on Livingston Street watching people hurrying along, making up stories about this one or that one."
"With just the sweep of a pen, Thomas, you can change the world, all of it."
"Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks."
"Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics—and they are mostly clever fools—seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way."
"Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can."
"However hard the planners tried to create new colonies of gleaming concrete, crumbling tomb towers, old mosques or ancient Islamic colleges - medresses - would intrude, appearing suddenly on roundabouts or in municipal gardens, curving the road network and obscuring the fairways of the golf course."
"New Delhi was not new at all. Its broad avenues encompassed a groaning necropolis, a graveyard of dynasties."
"But have you seen the movie Midnight Express...and...and how did it make you feel?"
"I am here to save you from a great ugliness."
"Life has a thing inside it that reaches beyond itself. This is intergalactic worm, I can't say here, you must wait."
"In the Bronze Age men had life and force, and I already see, far on the horizon of our world, but the glimmer is surely there—may it not be a mirage!—I see this spirit returning surely in our time. Piratical bands and brotherhoods will take to the seas, and not just to the seas. The enemies of Western man and the enemies of beauty are to learn just what was meant by a piratical race, a nest of pirates like the Chinese thought of the Dutch on first meeting them. I want to prepare you to receive this old spirit—old spirits are moving, from behind the reeds...the silhouette shimmers against a river in late summer, and I see already men who know how to honor such uncanny old friends. May they inhabit us again and give us strength to purify this world of refuse!"
"The demand for true trans liberation echoes and overlaps with the demands of workers, socialists, feminists, anti-racists and queer people. They are radical demands, in that they go to the root of what our society is and what it could be. For this reason, the existence of trans people is a source of constant anxiety for many who are either invested in the status quo or fearful about what would replace it. In order to neutralize the potential threat to social norms posed by trans people's existence, the establishment has always sought to confine and curtail their freedom. In twenty-first-century Britain, this has been achieved in large part by belittling our political needs and turning them into a 'issue'. Typically, trans people are lumped together as 'the transgender issue', dismissing and erasing the complexity of trans lives, reducing them to a set of stereotypes on which various social anxieties can be brought to bear. By and large, the transgender issue is seen as a 'toxic debate', a 'difficult topic' chewed over (usually by people who are not trans themselves) on television shows, in newspaper opinion pieces and in university philosophy departments. Actual trans people are rarely to be seen."
"‘Trans’ [...] is an umbrella term that describes people whose (their personal sense of their own gender) varies from, does not sit comfortably with, or is different from, the biological sex recorded on their birth certificate based on the appearance of their external . The standard view of how sex and gender manifest in the world is as follows. Babies born with observable penises are recorded as male, referred to and raised as boys, and as adults are men; babies born with observable vulvas are recorded as female, referred to and raised as girls, and as adults are women. To be trans is, on some level, to feel that this standardized relationship between one’s genitalia at birth and the assignment of one of two fixed gender identities that are supposed to accurately reflect your feelings about your own body has been interrupted. How the person who experiences this interruption reacts to it can vary hugely – which is why ‘trans’ is a catch-all word for a diverse range of identities and experiences."
Showing 50 of 62 quotes