Eleven interesting quotes, from a hoard obsessively collected over many years with no particular rhyme or reason

One of the things that I do instead of driving fast cars and dating supermodels is collect interesting quotes.

This is, perhaps, a sign of a larger psychosis, but any time that I run across an interesting string of words in a book, or a movie, or an advertisement, or a website, or a conversation with a homeless person, I go and write them down in a tiny little notepad .txt file that gets copied over to every computer that I've ever owned, like an immortal sorcerer putting his soul into a new host every millennia.

Anyways, I thought you might like to see some of them!

There is no particular rhyme or reason to them, other than that they grabbed my attention in some way, but I like to think that surrounding myself with these things has improved my own writing.

Without further ado, here's a dozen interesting quotes given in the order that I wrote them down an unknown number of years ago:

"Godzilla is the son of the atomic bomb. He is a nightmare created out of the darkness of the human soul. He is the sacred beast of the apocalypse."
-Tanaka Tomoyuki

"I do not live in the world of sobriety."
-Oliver Reed

"Timor mortis conturbat me."
-Literally: Fear of death disturbs me. (A frequent phrase in medieval poetry, and also the book from which our next quote comes.)

"luro vopo vir voarchadumia"
-Incantation from The Worm Ouroboros

"The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
-TS Eliot

"One should try anything he can in his career, except folkdance and incest."
-Sir Christopher Lee

"Until you have eradicated evil, do not obey your heart; for it will seek more of what it already contains within itself."
-St. Mark the Ascetic

"Every movie has to have a heart—a place where it defines itself—and in every movie I've made there's always a scene that does that. On Drive, it was hard for me to wrap my head around it. I realized I needed to show in one situation that Driver is the hopelessly romantic knight, but he's also completely psychotic and is willing to use any kind of violence to protect innocence."
-Nicolas Winding Refn

"When there’s true talent behind the camera, entertainment and art are not enemies but allies."
-James Rocchi

"Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world, I can't even finish my second apple pie."
-Banksy

"Justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them."
-Shantaram, the character Quasim Ali

What an interesting bunch of things!

The Godzilla quote was the first one that I ever wrote down (must have been almost 20 years ago now!)

For some reason, the phrase "sacred beast of the apocalypse" really stuck in my head, perhaps because it contrasts so heavily with the unholy beast of the apocalypse in Revelations. Sanctity and destruction were a combination that seemed novel at the time that I wrote it down. (Now, I'm pretty sure that Walmart sells Kevlar Bibles with a page to tally your kill count. ...It is a strange thing to see gun, cross, and flag slowly smushed into a single, alien emotion. This might be the reason that I have so many old religious quotes in this collection: it's kind of shocking to see how different the faith of the ancient and medieval world was, both from how we imagine it, and from the modern heightened emotional state that we now call faith.)

Or maybe this quote just stuck out to me because I had a really hard time reconciling it with the Godzilla that I grew up with.

The Oliver Reed quote ("I do not live in the world of sobriety") is one of those sentences that manages to pack an incredible amount of meaning into a simple statement. It is simultaneously a declaration of vice as identity, a belief that change and even control are impossible, and an acceptance of self-destruction. I'm struck by how indirect and impersonal the situation it lays out is: this is the world. Everyone else is simply in another kind of existence. It is very easy to look at someone with a clear external addiction and note these things. I wonder how many of our own addictions are explained away in the same manner: This is the world I live in, this is who I am, how can things be any other way?

One of the most interesting and terrible things about vice-as-identity is that it is the perfect (and natural) counter weapon to shame.

Trying to use shame will always push people towards things that turn shame into pride.

Of course, Oliver Reed was also playing up his hard drinking persona for the media. But then, he also did drink himself to death. (While filming Gladiator. The movie was finished with a stand-in and digital composition using cut footage of Reed.)

As for the final quote… I could write an entire essay about Shantaram. (Perhaps I will!) I saved a lot of quotes from it, but this one was the first. It rather jumped off the page when I first read it.

It still comes to me any time that people begin talking about crime and punishment of any kind.

I think, in many ways, we have adapted a... cinematic sense of justice. The film gives the bad guy what's coming to him and then moves on, never to put him on screen again. What happens after the bully has gotten rightfully humiliated in front of the whole class? Nothing that concerns him. His story is over.

Alas, human beings persist long after poetic justice of whatever flavor has been doled out. (Unless we decide that finite wrongdoing deserves infinite punishment, but it's hard to call such a system justice, much less correction.)

Any morality that does not include reconciliation is not a morality made for the real world.

Anyways, there you go! Some interesting quotes that still rattle around in my head after all these years.

Start your own neurotic collection today!*

*Action figures not included. Small parts may pose a choking hazard.

Happy trails, kosmonauts.