Quotes from Black Hole

Charles Burns ·  368 pages

Rating: (36.5K votes)


“Eliza sitting naked on a pink towel. So beautiful I could die.

Concentrating, all focused in on her sketchbook, but aw, god ...her tail.

Her cute little tail moving slowly back and forth, making a fan shape in the dirt.

She's the one. She really is. I know that now.”
― Charles Burns, quote from Black Hole


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


“It was finally all out of me... I was as pure and empty as the flames moving in front of me.”
― Charles Burns, quote from Black Hole


“That night was different... there was something pulling me towards him. Something dark and sexy.”
― Charles Burns, quote from Black Hole


“It's the bad place I always come back to in my dreams.”
― Charles Burns, quote from Black Hole



“I felt like I was looking into the future... and the future looked really messed up.”
― Charles Burns, quote from Black Hole


About the author

Charles Burns
Born date September 27, 1955
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Popular quotes

“Why," he was saying, "why should one not tolerate this life, since so little suffices to deprive one of it? So little brings it into being, so little brightens it, so little blights it, so little bears it away. Otherwise, who would tolerate the blows of fate and the humiliations of a successful career, the swindling of grocers, the prices of butchers, the water of milkmen, the irritation of parents, the fury of teachers, the bawling of sergeant-majors, the turpitude of the beasts, the lamentations of the dead-beats, the silence of infinite space, the smell of cauliflower or the passivity of the wooden horses on a merry-g0-round, were it not for his knowledge that the bad and proliferative behaviour of certain minute cells (gesture) or the trajectory of a bullet traced by an involuntary, irresponsible, anonymous individual might unexpectedly come and cause all these cares to evaporate into the blue heavens.”
― Raymond Queneau, quote from Zazie in the Metro


“Don't be afraid of the future, little Julia. Take your present life and live it.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Favored Child


“The Fates themselves grant us one or two places in our lives where the thread untwists and we can follow either one strand or the other. Better to know when and where those choices will come to us instead of being taken by surprise. “
“Why only one or two?” I asked, thinking of all the moments my life had already accumulated in which I’d chosen to follow a different path than the one most people would expect of me. “Why not say that every day lets me choose my own future?”
The priest chuckled. “What a gift you have for joking, Lady Helen! You know your future. You’ll be Sparta’s queen, living a life blessed by the gods. Your only surprises will be the name of your husband and whether your babies will be sons or daughters. You don’t need to visit the Pythia. But your noble brothers will be heroes, making their own futures; heroes should know what awaits them.”
“He’s right, Helen,” Castor said. “Polydeuces and I should know our fate.”
Castor’s fate? He didn’t need an oracle to discover that; I could tell him exactly what it would be. The young priest’s glib words were better than underground fumes for giving me a vision of what lay in store for both of my brothers: They were going to have their ears filled with flattery, then be persuaded to leave a rich gift at Apollo’s shrine just to hear some poor girl babble riddles while she choked half to death on smoke. Then they’d made another offering just to have Apollo’s priests translate the Pythia’s wild words. If their gifts to the sun god were too extravagant, I could also predict what Father would have to say about it when we got home.”
― Esther M. Friesner, quote from Nobody's Princess


“What was ridiculous about Christianity, from the perspective of a cultivated pagan, was not only its language—the crude style of the Gospels’ Greek resting on the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic—but also its exaltation of divine humiliation and pain conjoined with an arrogant triumphalism.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from The Swerve: How the World Became Modern


“I’m twenty-eight years old and I hate my life. I never have the time or the energy to work out how to change it. On Sundays I trail round a museum to keep warm, or lose myself in a library book, or fiddle with the wireless. But Monday’s already looming. And always I’ve got this panicky feeling inside, because I know I’m getting nowhere, just keeping myself alive. Tacked”
― Michelle Paver, quote from Dark Matter


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