Roger Waters Quotes

There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.

Mercy, mercy me, things ain't what they used to be.

I lay my head on the railroad track, waitin' on the Double E. But the train don't run by here no more, poor, poor, pitiful me.

Maybe there's a God above, As for me, all I've ever seemed to learn from love Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you. Yeah but it's not a complaint that you hear tonight, It's not the laughter of someone who claims to have seen the light No it's a cold and it's a very lonely Hallelujah.

We live a pleasant life shopping at the Food Shoppe . . . taking the kids to the Weinery-Beanery, . . . and eating bran flakes . .. and then, with no warning, we wake up one morning stricken with middle age, full of loneliness, dumb, in pain. Our work is useless, our vocation is lost, and nobody cares about us at all. This is not bearable. In despair, we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run away with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life look at us with unmitigated disgust.

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

Americans used to roar like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security.

We had loved people we really shouldn't have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.

No technological achievements can mitigate the disappointment of modern man, his loneliness, his feeling of inferiority, and his fear of war, revolution and terror. Not only has our generation lost faith in Providence but also in man himself, in his institutions and often in those who are nearest to him.

Any man that resists the present tides that run in the world, will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem he has been separated from his human kind forever.

The dark covers me and I cannot run now.

When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smooths her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.

A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricature. Our world is a world of things. What we dread most, in the face of the impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gewgaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts that have made us so uncomfortable. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky.

It's not fair to show someone the sun and then banish him from it. Even the devil may cry when he looks around hell and realizes that he's there alone. -Acheron

It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.

memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for

Even now, she wished she could write a note, push it across the table, and go away to her room. But she was no longer a Second Assistant Librarian of the Great Library of the Clayr. Those days were gone, vanished with everything else that had defined her previous existence and identity.

In a universe suddenly divested of illusion and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else.

you ever been trapped in a world where you're everyone's worst nightmare?

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.

There have been plenty of chances to close my eyes and go back to the sleep of my life as it was, but I hadn't taken any of them. Do I wish now that I had? It's hard to answer that question, as the wraiths move closer.

Goodbye to my friends at home, goodbye to people I've trusted. I've got to go out and make my way, I might get rich, you know I might get busted. But my heart keeps calling me backwards, as I get on the 707. Ridin' high, I got tears in my eyes, you know you got to go through hell before you get to heaven. Big ol' jet airliner, don't carry me too far away. Big ol' jet airliner, 'cause it's here that I've got to stay.