18 Quotes by Thomas Berger

Most of the people I have really cared about in this world, I have elected to the position. I have a belief that a man’s real relatives are scattered throughout the universe, and seldom if ever belong to his immediate kin.

Then I am fundamentally a slave, I whom you call the most glorious king of all?” said Arthur. “No man is free who needeth air to breathe,” said Merlin.

You might have thought the colonel would be interested in my experiences of five years’ barbarism, but he wasn’t. I wasn’t long in discovering that it is a rare person in the white world who wants to hear what the other fellow says, all the more so when the other fellow really knows what he is talking about.

Time is the bastard offspring of an incestuous act that God committed upon reality.” Merlin to Arthur in “Arthur Rex.

It was strange how in no time at all everybody went from fear to being excruciatingly bored, and the very women who yesterday had been helpless victims and just minutes earlier were howling in fright, now began to advance on him threatening with their fists and saying: ‘Git on out of here, you old skunk!’ Which shows something about the way a female is put together; she will suffer any outrage so long as it is interesting, but bore her and she don’t know fear.

Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.

I love her still, for if you know anything about that kind of feeling, you know how close it is connected to hopelessness and thus is about the only thing in civilization that don’t degenerate with time.

Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain’t done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.

No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.