John Gardner Quotes

Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we're the ones who securely tied the knot.

Usually we walk around constantly believing ourselves. "I'm okay" we say. "I'm alright". But sometimes the truth arrives on you and you can't get it off. That's when you realize that sometimes it isn't even an answer--it's a question. Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.

If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

Many a time comes when we want to interpret our weakness and cowardice as forgiveness and renunciation.

There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.

Ah, well, being conflicted means you can live a shallow life without copping to be a shallow person.

at this point I meet Me face to face. I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me.

Nobody knows you. You don't know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?

Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

When you question what you believe, you leave the world, really, and what the world believes. It puts you in a very interesting position.

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.

I'd always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew.

It is bad for the soul to know itself a coward, it is apt to take refuge in mere wordy violence.

There are days when I'll wake up and think, oh, I've really been something. You know, it won't be the same without me. And then there are days when I wake up and I say, 'Don't kid yourself. Your contribution was minimal. You changed very little. Everything you hated prospered'.

Quite simply, it is true that I can be a pig! It is not a lie to say that. Sometimes, I feel that I am in the right even when I am wrong.

Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the humble. So those on scepticism cause believers to affirm. Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, few doubtingly of scepticism.

From outside one will always triumphantly impress theories upon the world and then fall straight into the ditch one has dug, but only from inside will one keep oneself and the world quiet and true.

The trouble with giving yourself a pep talk is, that deep down you know it's all bullshit.

The false man is more false to himself than to any one else. He may despoil others, but himself is the chief loser. The world's scorn he might sometimes forget, but the knowledge of his own perfidy is undying.

Tis going, I own, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, in quest of melancholy adventures--but I know not how it is, but I am never so perfectly conscious of the existence of a soul within me, as when I am entangled in them.

You do not see clearly the evil in yourself, else you would hate yourself with all your soul. Like the lion who sprang at his image in the water, you are only hurting yourself, O foolish man. When you reach the bottom of the well of your own nature, then you will know that the vileness was from yourself.

For a moment the feeling crept over me that my work, my vision, is going to destroy me, and for a fleeting moment I let myself take a long, hard look at myself, something I would not otherwise do--out of instinct, on principle, out of self-preservation--look at myself with objective curiosity to see whether my vision has not destroyed me already. I found it comforting to note that I was still breathing.

We do. Or re-create the ones we have, and project. My whole life is projection.