Nick Drake Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

'Perhaps it is the human imagination that is the monster,' he said. 'I believe no animal suffers from the torments of the imagination. Only man…'
'The imagination is capable of enacting the very best in us, and the very worst,' agreed Hor, 'and I know what mine would like to do to some people.'
'Your verse is torment enough,' quipped the architect.
'And that is why civilized life, morality, ethics and so on, matter. We are half-enlightened, and half-monstrous,' said Nakht assertively. 'We must build our civility upon reason and mutual benefit.'
Sobek raised his cup.
'I salute your reason. I wish it every success.'

Nick Drake
I would much rather have a living husband with no job and no gold than a dead one.

Nick Drake
'I see I have shocked you all a little. But to be a poet is to accept the responsibility of speaking the truth! No matter what the cost to my personal safety [...] in matters of men and this world. I'm a poet, not a complete fool…'

Nick Drake
'Come on, Rahotep. How do you think Royal Envoy Nakht gets his information about events in the north, and in the war? The army has its intelligence, and the palace has its own, too. The days when an invasion or an attack took place and no one heard about it for months are long gone. This war's all about speed and information, and you can be sure Nakht has a very efficient system. The problem is, each system is always trying to infiltrate the other. And there's always the danger of spies.'

Nick Drake
'There is no such thing as a cheerful poem [...] Happiness writes in water, not ink.'

Nick Drake
I dislike talk of the Gods, who taunt us with their promises, and whose disappointments we must always accept.

Nick Drake
Fame is but a fruit tree
So very unsound
It can never flourish
Till its stalk is in the ground.

Nick Drake
'Everything you say always sounds exactly right, my friend. You have the gift of turning confusion into an epigram.' He smiled.
'Yes, but it is a kind of tyranny with me, for I am far too neat for my own good. And life, as we know, is mostly chaos.'

Nick Drake
'Perhaps our childhoods are buried inside all of us. Perhaps they set the pattern for our futures,' I suggested.
'In that case I am doomed by mine,' she said without self-pity.
'Perhaps not, for you are aware of it,' I said.

Nick Drake
'I suspect you are intent upon some sort of revenge, in response to this dreadful tragedy?'
'And?' I said.
'Let me counsel you. In moments such as this, we are inclined to allow the animal aspect of our natures to take control. It is a mistake.... Because revenge can destroy a man as surely as the plague. It seems like a god, so pure and true, and full of its sense of justice and entitlement. But it is truly a monster. It feeds perpetually upon its own pain, and upon any pain it can find. And it can never be satisfied until everything has been destroyed utterly.'

Nick Drake
Cruelty, rage, grief — and something others carelessly name evil — can reduce the strange collation of profanity and beauty which makes up each of us to an inanimate lump of decaying meat.

Nick Drake
It would be another day ruled by this world's new gods: gold and power.

Nick Drake
A little distance had opened between us, almost unnoticed, rarely acknowledged. We made love infrequently. The couch was for sleep at the end of exhausting days. I confided in her less often. Perhaps that is the fate of all marriages.

Nick Drake
Conflict defines nations. Enemies justify armies. Wars glorify generals. Without his great enemy to give him purpose and meaning, he will be significantly diminished. He will have to come to terms with us.

Nick Drake
Can love communicate over great distance? I could only hope so.

Nick Drake
Rhetoric is a dangerous art. It is the manipulation of the difference, one might say the distance, between truth and image [...] And in our times, that distance has become the means by which power is exercised [...] Rhetoric has been a force for persuasion since man began to speak, and to convince his enemy that he was indeed his friend.

Nick Drake
Death makes us strangers to ourselves... Do not indulge yourself in a self-pitying, self-gratifying revenge. More than likely you would simply end up dead as well.

Nick Drake
My dear friend, the world is really one vast marketplace. No one cares where a man is from as long as he has gold in his pocket, or something you want. And the remarkable thing is this: the wars have only encouraged demand, trade has actually boomed in these difficult years. The ships are full, everyone is happy. War and politics are irrelevant, unless the great flow of trade is disturbed.

Nick Drake
I woke early like a condemned man to the naivety of birdsong.

Nick Drake
You are like one of your bees, going from flower to flower, sampling the nectar of this and that.

Nick Drake
There is truth in what you say. Truth is a dangerous muse. One dies for the truth.

Nick Drake
But words are imperfect, and our system of writing, for all its great glories, has its limitations in terms of its ability to describe creation in all its manifest and hidden glories... So we would have to invent another way of describing things.

Nick Drake
'These ambassadors are all the same. They have the eyes of Anubis. And they make me feel like a servant. Like a shabti in a tomb. Here I am. I will do it! '

Nick Drake
For a world with so much sun we live in a dark place, in a dark time.

Nick Drake
This world and the Otherworld are full of curiosities and mysteries. It would take many lifetimes to understand them all. And disappointingly, it seems to me we only have one.

Nick Drake
Do intellect and morality count for nothing in the way the future unfolds? [...] Greed is our king, and corruption is his servant.

Nick Drake
And you must never speak of what I have just told you. For this is a great secret. And great secrets bring with them great responsibilities.

Nick Drake
Be careful, Rahotep, I know these writers, they say borrow when they mean steal. You will soon read your words coming back to you on some privately circulated scroll of new verse.

Nick Drake
For as I grow older, life seems to me simply an endless succession of problems to be solved, rather than hours to be enjoyed.

Nick Drake
Maybe I've finally learned the bitter truth that I can't beat them, even if I'll never join them. But I'm not going to lose the one thing I can still call my own: my life. And you should wise up and do the same, especially with a new child on the way.

Nick Drake