Top 81 Russell Hoban Quotes
#1. There must be a lot of people in the world being wondered about by people who don't see them any more.
Russell Hoban
#2. An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of; we blind them as quickly as possible.
Russell Hoban
#4. Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn't in us. It's almost as if we're put here on earth to show how silly they aren't.
Russell Hoban
#5. I had a salad. If I were to say that today's tomatoes were an index of the decline of Western man I should be thought a crank but nations do not, I think, ascend on such tomatoes.
Russell Hoban
#6. The silence sat down with them like an invisible creature with its finger to its lips.
Russell Hoban
#7. A map is the dead body of where you've been. A map is the unborn baby of where you're going. There are no maps. Maps are pictures of what isn't.
Russell Hoban
#8. We've tried the other way; we've tried making both things and people It, and we've seen the results.
Russell Hoban
#9. Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.
Russell Hoban
#10. There is a tiger in my room,' said Frances.
'Did he bite you?' said Father.
'No,' said Frances.
'Did he scratch you?' said Mother.
'No,' said Frances.
'Then he is a friendly tiger,' said Father. 'He will not hurt you. Go back to sleep.
Russell Hoban
#11. My generation was somewhat between things, neither free nor much supported by whatever held us in.
Russell Hoban
#13. He grew morose, and felt himself half overcome by funk
Russell Hoban
#14. Here below the surface one studies the depths of TO BE, as manifest in AM, IS, and ARE. And if you don't hold up your end of the conversation I may very well snap you in two.
Russell Hoban
#15. I cud feal some thing growing in me it wer like a grean sea surging in me it wer saying, LOSE IT. Saying, LET GO. Saying, THE ONLYES POWER IS NO POWER
The ruins of Canterbury Castle
Russell Hoban
#16. I have no wisdom and nothing useful to tell you - I only mentioned this because it came into my head.
Russell Hoban
#17. How was I to be a scientist, father Lion?' Science is knowing. What could I have known? Others always did the knowing, knew what was in me, what should come out of me, what was best for me. I didn't know who I was, what I wanted. I know less now, and I am afraid.
Russell Hoban
#18. Have you paused to consider that there is no way out? Each way out of one situation necessarily being the way into another situation.
Russell Hoban
#19. Life is a process of one goneness after another.
Russell Hoban
#20. The sign said 'The Green Turtle, Chelonia myadas, is the source of turtle soup ... ' I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London, that's a lot of soup walking around.
Russell Hoban
#21. He was thinking what a long and wide thing time is, to have so many happenings in it.
Russell Hoban
#22. When you suffer an attack of nerves you're being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system?
Russell Hoban
#23. If we'd been edible we'd never have lasted this long.
Russell Hoban
#24. And now it seems she's on my wavelength. That's all I need. My mind isn't much of a comfort to me but at least I thought it was private.
Russell Hoban
#25. It was the sort of situation that would be ever so charming and warmly human in a film with Peter Ustinov and Maggie Smith but that sort of film is only charming because they leave out so many details, and real life is all the details they leave out.
Russell Hoban
#26. But when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living. I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself.
Russell Hoban
#27. If reality had a stage door I'd hang around there to see what comes out after the show.
Russell Hoban
#28. More and more I'm aware that the permutations are not unlimited.
Russell Hoban
#29. Them as counts counts moren them as dont count
Russell Hoban
#30. Sometimes there's nothing but Sundays for weeks on end. Why can't they move Sunday to the middle of the week so you could put it in the OUT tray on your desk?
Russell Hoban
#31. What do you do when you're wound up?' she asked. 'Do you play that drum?'. 'No,' said the child. 'We used to dance.' 'But now we walk,' said the father. 'And behind us an enemy walks faster.' 'That's life,' said Euterpe.
Russell Hoban
#32. Time's arrow, we are told, is a one-way thing ... Memory's arrow, like the needle of a compass too close to a lodestone, spins in all directions.
Russell Hoban
#34. Oh, yes," said Mother, "you may be sure that there will always be plenty of chocolate cake around here.
Russell Hoban
#35. If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.
Russell Hoban
#36. I said, 'Yes theres a lot to look a head to. Like croaking iron at Widders Dump. We do the croaking and they get the iron.'
He said, 'Riddley theres other things to do as wel.'
I said, 'Yes and they all smel of cow shit dont they?
Russell Hoban
#37. I believe that most of us would like to be thought well of by horses.
Russell Hoban
#39. Am I doomed? Flashing darkness is pretty much the same as flashing light really. Fear isn't at all the same as courage but after a certain point perhaps being afraid of everything is the same as being afraid of nothing.
Russell Hoban
#40. Stil it takes you strange walking in your old foot steps like that. Putting your groan up foot where your chyld foot run nor dint know nothing what wer coming.
Russell Hoban
#41. Time's arrow points one way only. Even the moment just past cannot be returned to.
Russell Hoban
#42. Me, what's that after all? An arbitrary limitation of being bounded by the people before and after and on either side. Where they leave off I begin, and vice versa.
Russell Hoban
#43. There were times when it seemed the different parts of him where not all under the same management.
Russell Hoban
#44. We make fiction because we are fiction ... It lived us into being and it lives us still.
Russell Hoban
#45. Jachin-Boaz was at the age called middle life, but he did not believe that he had as many years ahead of him as he had behind him.
Russell Hoban
#46. We can't all be investigating non-coding DNA," I said, feeling an upsurge of gastric acid. "Some of us have to sell bullshit self-improvement courses
Russell Hoban
#47. He's taken half of our savings,' said his mother. 'If we lived without using the savings before,' said Boaz-Jachin, 'we can live without the half that he has taken.
Russell Hoban
#48. Looking at them words going down on this paper right this minim I know there aint no such thing there aint no only my self you all ways have every 1 and every thing on your back.
Russell Hoban
#49. Iyther you dont know nothing or you know too much it dont seam like theres any thing in be twean.
Russell Hoban
#50. It may happen to me at any time that everything will be just what it is, with no stories in anything.
Russell Hoban
#51. I have forgotten more of my life than I remember, and with my forgetting I have lost my being.
Russell Hoban
#52. The mouse and his child, who had learned so much and had prevailed against such overwhelming odds, never could be persuaded to teach a success course ... The whole secret of the thing, they insisted, was simply and at all costs to move steadily ahead, and that, they said, could not be taught.
Russell Hoban
#54. A frightening thought had been growing in me. I'd always assumed that I was the central character in my own story but now it occurred to me that I might in fact be only a minor character in someone else's.
Russell Hoban
#56. Seeds blow in the wind and what is earf but a deadness with life growing out of it?
Russell Hoban
#58. The zoo is a prison for animals who have been sentenced without trial and I feel guilty because I do nothing about it. I wanted to see an oyster-catcher, so I was no better than the people who caged the oyster-catcher for me to see.
Russell Hoban
#59. O yes youwl want to think on that you dont want your mouf to walk you where your feet dont want to go.
Russell Hoban
#60. You hear diffrent things in all them way back storys but it dont make no diffrents, Mostly they aint strait storys any how. What they are is diffrent ways of telling what happent.
Russell Hoban
#61. All roads, whether long or short, are hard," said Frog. "Come, you have begun your journey, and all else necessarily follows from that act. Be of good cheer. The sun is bright. The sky is blue. The world lies before you.
Russell Hoban
#62. There are situations in life to which the only satisfactory response is a physically violent one. If you don't make that response, you continually relive the unresolved situation over and over in your life.
Russell Hoban
#63. Dont you know if you keap getting a head of your self youwl jus only fall over your self when you get to where you are going?
Russell Hoban
#64. Where are we?' the mouse child asked his father. His voice was tiny in the stillness of the night. 'I don't know' the father replied. 'What are we Papa?'. 'I don't know. We must wait and see'.
Russell Hoban
#65. Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart.
Russell Hoban
#66. Navigare necesse est. Vivere non est necesse.' I've
Russell Hoban
#67. There were no lions any more. There had been lions once. Sometimes in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind - tawny, great, and quickly gone. Sometimes the honey-colored moon shivered to the silence of a ghost-roar on the rising air.
Russell Hoban
#68. Who is Alice?" asked mother.
"Alice is somebody that nobody can see," said Frances. "And that is why she does not have a birthday. So I am singing Happy Thursday to her." - Frances the badger
Russell Hoban
#69. Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we dont know what it is.
Russell Hoban
#70. Language is an archaeological vehicle ... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.
Russell Hoban
#71. Wel you know 1ce the kids start singing at you thats a cern kynd of track youre on nor there aint too much you can do about it. Making the kids stop singing wont help its too late by then youve jus got to clinch your teef and get on with it.
Russell Hoban
#72. Shamans wear bird costumes and they fly. Somehow they experience flying.
Russell Hoban
#73. After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?
Russell Hoban
#75. But more and more I think that madness is the world's natural condition and to expect anything else is madness compounded.
Russell Hoban
#76. The things that matter don't necessarily make sense.
Russell Hoban
#77. Yes thats what I done you sorry sods I over the fents and off with the dogs...
Russell Hoban
#78. Destiny is not to be trifled with. Do not commit the tragic error of satisfying present appetite at the cost of future fulfilment
Russell Hoban
#79. All of this comes out of what is now an empty space. There are depths to this. It's a lot to think about. From an empty space the future. If there's no empty space where can one put the future? It all figures if you take the time to think it out.
Russell Hoban
#80. What is all this talk of elephants and seals?' asked Frog. 'It's nonsense', said the father, 'and yet it's not the child's fault. Our motor is in me. He fills the empty space inside himself with foolish dreams that cannot possibly come true'.
Russell Hoban
#81. A turtle doesn't have to decide every morning whether to keep on bothering, it just carries on. Maybe that's why man kills everything: envy.
Russell Hoban
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