Russell Hoban Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

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
Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish.…It's almost as if we were put here on earth to show how silly they aren't.

Russell Hoban
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
Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Russell Hoban
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
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
What a weird thing smoking is and I can't stop it. I feel cosy, have a sense of well-being when I'm smoking, poisoning myself, killing myself slowly. Not so slowly maybe. I have all kinds of pains I don't want to know about and I know that's what they're from. 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
Perhaps this world that's in us, this world that we're in, was never meant to be fixed and permanent; perhaps it's only one of a continuous succession of world-ideas passing through the world-mind. And we are, all of us, the passing and impermanent perceivers of it.

Russell Hoban
I believe that most of us would like to be thought well of by horses.

Russell Hoban
Reality is ungraspable. For convenience we use a limited-reality consensus in which work can be done, transport arranged, and essential services provided. The real reality is something else — only the strangeness of it can be taken in.

Russell Hoban
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
The world vibrates like a crystal in the mind; there is a frequency at which terror and ecstasy are the same and any road might be taken.

Russell Hoban
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
Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.

Russell Hoban
More and more I'm aware that the permutations are not unlimited.

Russell Hoban
My generation was somewhat between things, neither free nor much supported by whatever held us in.

Russell Hoban
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
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
I have no wisdom and nothing useful to tell you - I only mentioned this because it came into my head.

Russell Hoban
If reality had a stage door I'd hang around there to see what comes out after the show.

Russell Hoban
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
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
My despair has long since been ground up fine and is no more than the daily salt and pepper of my life.

Russell Hoban
More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.

Russell Hoban
Each of us is the forward point of a procession stretching back into the darkness. And even within oneself, every moment is a self that dies: the road to each day's midnight is littered with corpses and all of them whispering.

Russell Hoban
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
There's more emptiness in the air than there used to be, and its spores grow flowers of dust in the lungs.

Russell Hoban
There must be a lot of people in the world being wondered about by people who don't see them anymore.

Russell Hoban
Early on in my childhood I sensed the thinness of reality and I became terrified of what might be on the other side of the membrane: I imagined a ceaseless becoming that swallowed up everything. I used to lie awake in the night and grind my teeth. But after a while anything becomes home, even terror.

Russell Hoban
In the morning I came awake as I always do, like a man trapped in a car going over a cliff.

Russell Hoban