Stephen R. Donaldson · 1160 pages
Rating: (12.9K votes)
“Stone and sea are deep in life
Two unalterable symbols of the world
Permanence at rest
And permanence in motion
Participants in the power that remains”
― Stephen R. Donaldson, quote from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
“It is wrong to ask for more than you give freely. In this way, we come to resemble what we hate.”
― Stephen R. Donaldson, quote from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
“And he who wields white, wild magic gold is a paradox
For he is everything and nothing
Hero and fool
Potent, helpless
And with one word of truth or treachery
He will save or damn the earth
Because he is mad and sane
Cold and passionate
Lost and found”
― Stephen R. Donaldson, quote from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
“Part of him wanted to weep... but his purpose was rigid within him. He felt he could not bend to gentleness without breaking.”
― Stephen R. Donaldson, quote from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
“And you require no answers", Foamfollower was laughing in his gladness, "You are sufficient to every question".”
― Stephen R. Donaldson, quote from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
“But he could not call the doctors at the leprosarium. They would return him to Louisiana. They would treat him and train him and counsel him. They would put him back into life as if his illness were all that mattered, as if wisdom were only skin deep, as if grief and remorse and horror were nothing but illusions, tricks done with mirrors, irrelevant to chrome and porcelain and clean, white, stiff hospital sheets and fluorescent lights.”
― Stephen R. Donaldson, quote from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
“It's not true that you were the good child. Not a good child at all. You were scared of rejection, so you made yourself a convenient child for your parents to have around."
"And your good parents - well, that is a lie as well. Not good parents at all, always looking over their shoulders, afraid of what people might be saying behind their backs. You think that liars who flock together never betray each other? Oh, you will betray your parents. And your parents will betray you. It is the way of all flesh. We tell each other our lies and the betrayed betrays the betrayer.”
― Fuyumi Ono, quote from The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Shadow
“There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on this occasion, at the sight of a happy man I was overcome by an oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother’s bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! ‘What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying... Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes... Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition... And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It’s a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him—disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree—and all goes well.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from Racconti
“Let me sit in a flowerpot,
The spiders won't notice.
My heart is a stopped geranium.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“It was never too late, she said, to turn a living thing around, and a garden was the most living of things.”
― Katherine Rundell, quote from The Girl Savage
“Why did everyone else seem fine but I felt as if I were living in a cage I'd outgrown two shoe sizes ago?”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Dangerous
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