Quotes from Life Knocks

“At the end of the world the sunset is like a child smashing a pack of crayons into God’s face.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“My landlord lives in the flat at the bottom of the stairs. I rent a studio flat from him, and live at the top of the staircase. There are two more flights of stairs and four more flats, but it’s me he is obsessed with.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“Small quarrels and tensions were expected because of our new environment. Every relationship has them. Each quarrel was soon forgotten and floated away on a wave. And then sometimes, on our silly days, the arguments returned on the wave, but the wave returned taller, a Tsunami, and neither of us knew where to run or what to do.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“I stared up in disbelief at the information my eyes fed my brain, and lost myself to the stars.
For the first time in my life I had a greater idea of how infinitesimally small our planet really is and, furthermore, how tiny and insignificant I am in the grand scheme of the vast universe.
I took a seat on a rock next to Lily and took in the moment to comprehend the vastness of everything else, and the incredible smallness of I.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“Mohammad’s face is serious. He takes another puff of his cigarette and coughs out dead air which, after leaving his lungs and hitting the outside world, takes its first breath on a journey to a fresher life. He drops his cigarette into the snow, places his foot over the burning end, twists his shoe to make sure it’s out, and tells me he’s trusting me. I have no idea what he’s trusting me with, but whatever it is, it’s so dangerous or evil he can’t bring himself to speak of it out loud.
Hitler has just shared with me his plans for the final solution, and I've been subtly informed I have no choice but to come along for the ride.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“A person dies every second, but there’s also a six year old somewhere, every second, trying to move an apple with his mind.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“His fingers are too long and when he talks he uses them to point out moments in his sentences. When he does, as the tips of his spindly fingers touch the words his mouth forms, his words turn dark before my eyes and disintegrate like twisted people caught embracing the metallic surface of a detonating atomic bomb, then his breath blows away the ashes making way for fresh words.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“My search for more attributes ended when I was halted in my tracks by the sky in her eyes looking back.
I took the ball. And she noticed the sky in my eyes too.
Our eyes kissed, and from that moment, we were inseparable.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“She danced like no one was watching, but she knew that I was.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll evolve to become so skilled at fishing he destroys the ocean and kills every last fish.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“The builder has ginger curly hair on top of his head, and a thick moustache. He has the look of a McDonald’s manager from 1970 who spends his evenings sitting in the smoky back row of theatres in Soho. He’s tall and muscular with hands the size of shopping baskets and, on the one occasion I did briefly meet him, I stared into his eyes and was shocked by their darkness. His nose is broken in three places and is the size and shape of a chicken nugget. A deep scar runs the length of his cheek hinting at a violent past.
Old tattoos fade on his arms.
The builder may have killed another human being at some point in his life.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“I listened to the crashing thundering of a tiny tear tumbling like a wave down her beautiful face.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“Love is a pig dressed as a clown sitting in a bath full of beans: pretty much amazing, once you get over the shock.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“A watched pot never boils, but if I took my eyes from these negative thoughts for a second they would spill over the edges of my lips, and boil the beautiful moment alive as we lived it.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“Cambodian dust whipped up in the wind and stuck to my clothes like clay. I put a hand between my face and the sun and blinked Phnom Penn dust from my tired eyes. One idea, drink, beamed light in all directions across my dark consciousness.
A slim lady walked toward me with a big smile and a bigger head. Her left hand rested on her waggling hips and her right hand rose above her head, limp-wristed, like she’d just thrown a winning ball toward a basket and was leaving her hand in the shot position. The lady walking toward me was a man. At least that much was clear, but the nature or our relationship was still a fog to me. She wore blue jeans and a white top accentuating her breasts, but her Adam’s apple and cow sized hands revealed more in daylight than she could hide at night.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“He wasn't like some of the hippies in England, where the qualification to rebel is planted by the guilt raised from being a spoilt child with a good education. He was a real hippy born from being forced to kill for his army until he was twenty one. He had long hair because the army made him shave his head. The army made him shave every day too. Now he had a beard. His face for a long time was not his own. When this guy said he was all about peace he wasn't talking about peace because his mum never got him the horse he wanted for his eighteenth birthday, he was talking about peace because he’d seen war. He talked about love because he knew hate: hate for those above him, hate for those he had served with, hate for enemies not born his but who became so and, lastly, hate for himself for how his mind had been controlled.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“I was staying in a hotel in San Francisco for a couple of nights, before flying back to the UK. My hotel was a desperate grey block made from paper and people’s screams. At night the sound of strangers having icy sex echoed off the building and poured through the broken air conditioning, like tiny daggers I couldn't see, reminding me of just the tip of what I was missing.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“I was just another lost soul screaming through the paper thin hotel walls into the ears of the fucked.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“The sharpest tools in the box are not always the best tools for the job.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“The beauty of having nothing to lose, is you learn the beauty of having everything to gain.
This is where hope lives.
Hope can’t be taken.
Hope can’t be lost.
Hope can’t be broken.
When we are boiled down to what we are as people. We are not love, because we hope to love, we are not money or who we hold, because we hope to have and to hold. We are not religion or God, because we enter into belief in the hope we get something back for ourselves. We are not a soul.
We are hope.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“Winter has arrived in North London. Snow has settled.
The white snow looks beautiful and covers everything my eyes can see, yet beneath the incomprehensible beauty, the snow freezes greenery which struggles to breathe.
Green leaves freeze from existence as children scream go faster to fathers who push them along in upside down bin lids, as they make the most of their schools being closed.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

“Stale beer sticks to wobbling tables. The cigarette machine flashes in the corner, mocking smokers who never have any change on them. There’s no natural light in this pub, so it’s dark and gloomy. The pain on the face of the staff tells its own story: overworked, underpaid, exploited and treated as expendable. I feel at home with them. They’re so scared they will be fired from their terrible jobs, every time I order a beer they ask me if I want any peanuts or crisps, in case between drinks I’ve turned into the dreaded mystery shopper. The air is chewy and weighs heavy on the skin. The fruit machines in the corners don’t make a sound, aware this is the last stop saloon for the drunk few who can’t afford to gamble properly. Everyone here is down to their last pint and pound.”
― Craig Stone, quote from Life Knocks

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Popular quotes

“For most affairs, this eventually becomes the most fundamental of questions, the only one that matters: Do we love each other more than the lives we already have? It is the question that hovers in the background of every secret phone call, flavors every tryst with the head of possibilities of apocalypse and renewal; and it is the answer to that question, or the lack thereof, that so often dooms an affair to failure.”
― Brady Udall, quote from The Lonely Polygamist

“Psychologically, we’re all a complex mixture of hopes and fears. Each day we wake up with the scales tipping a bit one way or the other. If they go too far toward hopefulness, we can become naïve and unrealistic. If the scales tilt too far the other way, we can get consumed by paranoia and hatred.”
― Bill Clinton, quote from My Life

“She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring--to strike--when the band behind her fired up the school song: "Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High.”
― Harry Crews, quote from A Feast of Snakes

“If one prevents a man from working for the good of society while at the same time providing for the satisfaction of his own needs, then only one way remains open to him: to make himself richer and others poorer by the violent oppression and spoliation of his fellow men.”
― Ludwig von Mises, quote from Liberalism: The Classical Tradition

“To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit,l from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, quote from Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life

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