John Knowles Quotes

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.

See, I will always have this penchant for what I call kamikaze women. I call them kamikazes because they, you know they crash their plane, they're self-destructive. But they crash into you, and you die along with them.

I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.

To caress the serpent that devours us, until it has eaten away our heart.

I set off, off to kill the man I love.

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

God defend me from myself.

Chaos needs no allies, for it dwells like a poison in every one of us.

In the end you will be your own undoing. You can't escape you.

I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me.

They build their own Hells.

This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.

You don't dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.

I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love.

Nobody's trying to kill you, Deirdre. You're killing yourself.

I punish myself for my whole life, my whole life I punish.

In spite of really intense competition for the job, I'm still my own worst enemy.

We are the breakers of our own hearts

Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.

Fear of self is the greatest of all terrors, the deepest of all dread, the commonest of all mistakes. From it grows failure. Because of it, life is a mockery. Out of it comes despair.

They were seeking out the treasure of their destiny, without actually wanting to live out their destiny.

I always wanted to play the boyfriends of doomed girls.

I suppose it’s comfort, perhaps a sense of self-control, doing worse things to yourself than the world will ever dare inflict.

Bitterness is the trap that snares the hunter

Energy had fastened upon her like a disease.