“How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn't anybody's fault but your own. Of course that was the problem.
All right. Everything is a dream. Nothing hangs together. You move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change. Your eyes see things and your ears hear, but nothing has any reason behind it. It would be easier to believe in God. Then you could wake up and yawn and stretch and grin at a world that was put together on a plan of mercy and death, punishment for evil, joy for good, and if the game was crazy at least it had rules. But that didn't make sense. It had never made any sense. The trouble was, now that he was not asleep and not awake, what he saw and heard didn't make sense either.
Mishmash, he thought. You know enough to know how you feel is senseless, but you don't know enough to know why.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“All night long, in his cell, he burned with hatred. It did not matter what he thought, it was how he felt; and alone in the darkness of his cell, with the muttering noises of the tank around him, he felt like murdering the universe.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“He did not want to see the war movie. It would be full of shit.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“Didn't they understand that for some people the opera, the drama, the ballet, were only boring, and yet a peepshow on Market Street was art? They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don't they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don't have it? Ha, what do they care about people with bad taste! Nothing. But I do. I love them. They wear cheap perfume and carry transistor radios. They buy plastic dog turds and painted turtles and pennants and signs that say, "I don't swim in your toilet, so please don't pee in my pool!" and they buy smelly popcorn and eat it on the street and go to bad movies and stand here in doorways sneaking nips of whiskey just like I'm doing, and they're all so nice.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“Remove,’ I said to myself, `the impetus to private ownership, and you have made the first giant step toward removing the causes of injustice in the world. There would be no greed if there were no possessions, no jealousy, no envy, perhaps even no hatred.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn't anybody's fault but your own. Of course that was the problem.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“He promptly forgot all about being the hero of a coward’s nightmare,”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“It was an awful word. Nothing. It made him sick at heart. He refused to believe it. Hebdemanded that there be something he could do. He demanded that his love be worth something to his child. If it wasn't, life was garbage. He hd to rulenout the idea that life was just a matter of accident, of percentages, because it was just too goddamn much to stand for. There had to be some way you could make yourself be felt.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
Don Carpenter
Born place: in Berkeley, California, The United States
Born date March 16, 1931
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“you can certainly learn from the successes of great men, you can learn even more from their failures and mistakes.”
― Amish Tripathi, quote from Scion of Ikshvaku
“That night my new skin was red silk, shivering in the breeze.”
― Emma Donoghue, quote from Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins
“So might we ourselves look down into some rock-pool where lowly creatures repeat with naive zest dramas learned by their ancestors æons ago.”
― Olaf Stapledon, quote from Star Maker
“Alyce," she breathed. Alyce sounded clean and smart. You could love someone maned Alyce. She looked back at the face in the water. "This is me, Alyce." It was right. So the newly called Alyce shifted the pack on her shoulders, and with her head back and bare feet solid on the ground, she headed back to the midwife's cottage and never noticed when it grew dark, for heat and light were within her.”
― Karen Cushman, quote from The Midwife's Apprentice
“Words were so puzzling. Present should mean a present just as attack should mean to stick tacks in people.”
― Beverly Cleary, quote from Ramona the Pest
Maybe Someday
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Finnegans Wake
Once and Always
Winger
The Realms of the Go...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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