David Souter Quotes

The novel is like a melancholy form. It's about some kind of disillusionment with the way things are versus the idea of how they could be or how they used to be.

To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.

Past and to come, seems best; things present, worse.

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.

The only deadly sin I know is cynicism.

People don't believe in positive changes anymore.

Hope is the denial of reality.

There is no past that we can bring back to us by the longing for it.

Cynicism, I contend, is the wailing of someone who believes that things are, or should be, or could be, much, much better than they are.

You can certainly get an idea of the value of memory if your memories can carry you out into the world no matter how utterly dissatisfied you may be with the present and wish you could get away from it.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

I'm always sad to leave paradise, but I leave behind the hopes of coming again soon.

The devastating scale and frequency of my disappointment was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world, of what high hopes I still had for it.

False hope really makes you cynical.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.

The old happiness is unreturning. Boy's griefs are not so grievous as youth's yearning. Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.

But Valentine, why despair, why always paint the future in such sombre hues?" Maximilien asked. "Because, my friend, I judge it by the past.

Neither mine nor other people's prospects seem particularly pleasing just at the moment, and I have fantasies of going to Iceland, never to return. As it is, I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success.

My thoughts by night are often filled With visions false as fair: For in the past alone, I build My castles in the air.

I'm certainly dismayed by what I'm seeing now. There's a lot of ugliness of a kind I've never seen in my lifetime, or heard in my lifetime. But, look, I'm a romantic. I'm hopeful.

I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.

It's so easy to get caught up in this weird life. This isn't normal and I'm not singing for people that live my life. I'm singing to the life I used to have. The life I want to have again.

I want no part of making any contribution whatsoever to the despair which eventually follows downbeat thinking.

Beautiful dreams - if the world were more beautiful they would come true - But the world is relentless & cruel - people are - they must be, I suppose, or they could not live.