Quotes from The Bellwether Revivals

Benjamin Wood ·  432 pages

Rating: (2.4K votes)


“Actually, I think it's the opposite. We know each other so well there isn't anything left to say. Sometimes it's nice just sitting here with you all, thinking. It's only best friends who can be comfortable with silence, wouldn't you say?”
― Benjamin Wood, quote from The Bellwether Revivals


“My theory is that hope is a form of madness. A benevolent one, sure, but madness all the same. Like an irrational superstition--broken mirrors and so forth--hope's not based on any kind of logic, it's just unfettered optimism, grounded in nothing but faith in things beyond our control.”
― Benjamin Wood, quote from The Bellwether Revivals


“Sometimes, you can hold a grudge for so long you forget why you were holding onto it. And before you know it, half a lifetime has gone by and all you’ve got is a empty fist and a lot of regret.”
― Benjamin Wood, quote from The Bellwether Revivals


“Once you surrender to hope, its a long road back to reason." There was a certain tone of self-loathing in the way Crest said it.”
― Benjamin Wood, quote from The Bellwether Revivals


“And Oscar would tell the old man his only regret: that he was living the unremarkable life his parents had always expected from him.”
― Benjamin Wood, quote from The Bellwether Revivals



“Once you surrender to hope, it’s a long road back to reason.”
― Benjamin Wood, quote from The Bellwether Revivals


“Oscar was raised to believe that if he stayed in his room reading about made up worlds it meant he didn't appreciate the life he had, the possessions his parents had worked hard for, like the TV and the video and the newly turfed back garden.”
― Benjamin Wood, quote from The Bellwether Revivals


“My theory is that hope is a form of madness. A benevolent one, sure, but madness all the same.”
― Benjamin Wood, quote from The Bellwether Revivals


About the author

Benjamin Wood
Born place: The United Kingdom
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Popular quotes

“To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.”
― Mark Helprin, quote from A Soldier of the Great War


“Never let fear and stupid pride make you lose someone who's precious to you.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage


“Let us define our terms. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is simply a woman in love. But my friend who xeroxes his love letters so he can publish them someday--my friend is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's immediate family); it is a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In this sense the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is the result of the passion, not the passion itself.

"Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions:

1. a high degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities;
2. an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual;
3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi [character from the book] was absolutely right when she claimed never to have experienced anything from the outside. It is this absence of content, this void, that powers the moter driving her to write).

"But the effect transmits a kind of flashback to the cause. If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.”
― Milan Kundera, quote from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting


“It just...it seems hard to say anything that isn't the wrong thing.”
― Richard Bachman, quote from Thinner


“Then the wind came in with Bart and blew the vase of roses from the table. I stood and stared down at the crystal pieces and the petals scattered about. Why was the wind always trying to tell me something? Something I didn't want to hear!”
― V.C. Andrews, quote from Petals on the Wind


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