John Jakes Quotes

Love and pain become one in the same in the eyes of a wounded child.

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.

Sometimes, I see and hear stories, especially those that involve children, and I wonder if this is hell and we are trying to get into heaven.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.

I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.

Sometimes it is hell, trying to get to heaven.

If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heaven. No more damned magic.

If you only knew what it did to me to have lived in that house where the police were bursting in to take everyone away! I certainly didn't have a happy and serene childhood.

I had proof that I had five senses, that I knew how to get myself to function! And then I lost my childhood.

The heaven of the envied is hell for the envious.

He looked as though his life had not only passed him by but paused along the way to spit in his face.

Sometimes you've got to go through hell to get to heaven.

[Adoption] could turn you into an exquisite comedian. Ask Richard Pryor's ghost.

[Doctor Strange] gets scraped off the floor and then thrown right down to hell again and then slowly pulls himself back up.

No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.

Hell is out of fashion - institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.

O, then, what graces in my love do dwell, that he hath turn'd a heaven unto hell

Been to hell and back, I can show you vouchers.

I could believe only in the hell I was living in, a hell on earth, and it was man-made, not God-made.

To the children and the innocent it's all the same.

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.

You heard of hell, well I was sent from it.