Burton Quotes

One person's craziness is another person's reality.

For me, literacy means freedom. For the individual and for society.

Little islands are all large prisons; one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.

Everything in this room is edible. Even I'm edible. But, that would be called canibalism. It is looked down upon in most societies.

Stick Boy liked Match Girl, He liked her a lot. He liked her cute figure, he thought she was hot. But could a flame ever burn for a match and a stick? It did quite literally; he burned up quick.

Day followed day, each one a little different from the one before...but the little house stayed just the same.

We all know interspecies romance is weird.

Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?

Good morning starshine the earth says hello....

But she knows she has a curse on her, a curse she cannot win. For if someone gets too close to her, the pins stick further in.

Mad Matter: "Have I gone mad?" Alice: "I'm afraid so. You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are.

Every woman is the architect of her own fortune.

You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are.

I am the shadow on the moon at night/Filling your dreams to the brim with fright.

Movies are like an expensive form of therapy for me.

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.

Son, are you happy? I don't mean to pry, but do you dream of Heaven? Have you ever wanted to die?

When you don’t have many friends and you don’t have a social life you’re kind of left looking at things, not doing things. There’s a weird freedom in not having people treat you like you’re part of society or where you have to fulfill social relationships.

[T]hou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.

In suffering we find our truest selves.

How long is forever? Sometimes just one second

I am not a dark person and I don't consider myself dark.

I've always been misrepresented. You know, I could dress in a clown costume and laugh with the happy people but they'd still say I'm a dark personality.

For some of us, Halloween is everyday.

Certain things leave you in your life and certain things stay with you. And that's why we're all interested in movies- those ones that make you feel, you still think about. Because it gave you such an emotional response, it's actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way.

People told me I couldn't kill Nicholson, so I cast him in two roles and killed him off twice.

I was never interested in what everybody else was interested in. I was very interiorized. I always felt kind of sad.

My name is Jimmy, but my friends just call me the hideous penguin boy.

Voodoo Girl Her skin is white cloth, and she's all sewn apart and she has many colored pins sticking out of her heart. She has many different zombies who are deeply in her trance. She even has a zombie who was originally from France. But she knows she has a curse on her, a curse she cannot win. For if someone gets too close to her, the pins stick farther in.

The Girl With Many Eyes One day in the park I had quite a surprise. I met a girl who had many eyes. She was really quite pretty (and also quite shocking!) and I noticed she had a mouth, so we ended up talking. We talked about flowers, and her poetry classes, and the problems she'd have if she ever wore glasses. It's great to know a girl who has so many eyes, but you really get wet when she breaks down and cries.

He that increaseth wisdom, increaseth sorrow.

I have a problem when people say something's real or not real, or normal or abnormal. The meaning of those words for me is very personal and subjective. I've always been confused and never had a clearcut understanding of the meaning of those kinds of words.

Half the fun is plan to plan

They took a baseball bat and whacked open his head. Mummy Boy fell to the ground; he finally was dead. Inside of his head were no candy or prizes, just a few stray beetles of various sizes.

And I Jack, the Pumpkin King, have grown so tired of the same old thing...

If you can’t laugh together in bed, the chances are you are incompatible, anyway. I’d rather hear a girl laugh well than try to turn me on with long, silent, soulful, secret looks. If you can laugh with a woman, everything else falls into place.

I wouldn't know a good script if it bit me in the face.

If you've ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays within you.

What cannot be cured must be endured.

Maybe it’s just in America, but it seems that if you’re passionate about something, it freaks people out. You’re considered bizarre or eccentric. To me, it just means you know who you are.

Men are obtuse. You have to beat them over the head with a frying pan to get them to notice things.

Growing older does not seem to make you more certain, Nella thinks. It simply presents you with more reasons for doubt.

I love you, asshole." Then Gavin laughed. "Right back at you, dickhead.

My diagnosis," he said "for better or worse, is that your son is the result of an old pharaoh's curse.

Most people say about graveyards: "Oh, it's just a bunch of dead people. It's creepy." But for me, there's an energy to it that it not creepy, or dark. It has a positive sense to it.

Granted, physical attraction is what gets you in the door. But there has to be something beyond that to want to keep you there.

That which others hear or read of, I felt and practised myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing.

Pity, unlike hate, can be boxed and put away.

Can a heart break, once it's stopped beating?

One of the things that we were trying to do with this show was the complexities of relationships and love. There is both passion and longing and a bittersweet quality to it that is a part of life.

If on a friend’s bookshelf You cannot find Joyce or Sterne Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton, You are in danger, face the fact, So kick him first or punch him hard And from him hide behind a curtain.

If you like not my writing, go read something else.

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause. He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

You don't know whether chimps are going to kill you or kiss you. They're very open on some levels and much more evil in a certain way.

Stick Boy liked Match Girl, he liked her a lot. He liked her cute figure, he thought she was hot.

Sometimes your world falls apart. And it’s okay for you to let people in and let them see you crumble

Fate will unwind as it must!

Melancholy can be overcome only by melancholy.

Let us cry for the spilt milk, by all means, if by doing so we learn how to avoid spilling any more. Let us cry for the spilt milk, and remember how, and where, and why, we spilt it. Much wisdom is learnt through tears, but none by forgetting our lessons.

Everything Man sees he takes for a toy. Thus is he always, forever a boy.

A lifetime isn't enough to know how a person will behave.

Staring Girl I once knew a girl who would just stand there and stare. At anyone or anything, she seemed not to care She'd stare at the ground, She'd stare at the sky. She'd stare at you for hours, and you'd never know why. But after winning the local staring contest, she finally gave her eyes a well-deserved rest.

And in that one grey hair I saw my whole life and I said "I think I need a hair.

It's in our genetics. It's why women are the master species. We give birth and we can walk in heels.

Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy.

Mr. Smith yelled at the doctor, What have you done to my boy? He's not flesh and blood, he's aluminum alloy!" The doctor said gently, What I'm going to say will sound pretty wild. But you're not the father of this strange looking child. You see, there still is some question about the child's gender, but we think that its father is a microwave blender.

I think reading is part of the birthright of the human being

Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Not necessarily in that order.

You are sunlight through a window, which I stand in, warmed. My darling.

Home is where the books are

I think you’re worth fighting for, Elizabeth. Even if I’m fighting you for you.

Bastard." "You love me." "Yes, I do. Now let me come.

Why would you want to go up there, when people are dying to get down here?

Minister: Welcome, brother! Do you reject Satan and all his works? Bunny Breckinridge: Sure.

A quiet mind cureth all.

Every man for himself, the devil for all.

See, that's the problem with men and women and relationshits. Shit. Relasinsips. Dammit. Relationships. There, I got it.

Unwisely, Santa offered a teddy bear to James, unaware he had been mauled by a grizzly earlier this year.

Mayor: How horrible our Christmas will be! Jack Skellington: *No.* [the Mayor switches to his upset face] Jack Skellington: How *jolly*! Mayor: Oh. How *jolly* our Christmas will be

She was like his favorite candy - hard on the outside but a soft surprise on the inside.

Human beings are the laziest creatures in the history of creation. We would rather not do anything if we could avoid it.

If you want something to last forever, you treat it differently. You shield it and protect it. You never abuse it. You don’t expose it to the elements. You don’t make it common or ordinary. If it ever becomes tarnished, you lovingly polish it until it gleams like new. It becomes special because you have made it so, and it grows more beautiful and precious as time goes by.

Love is like farm work. It requires consistency, and imagination. Your body will ache and you will be fatigued, but there is no greater reward than seeing the fruits of your labor.

Depression: the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating.

Let thy fortune be what it will, 'tis thy mind alone that makes thee poor or rich, miserable or happy.

The Boy with Nails in His Eyes put up his aluminum tree. It looked pretty strange because he couldn't really see.

I am not poor, I am not rich; nihil est, nihil deest, I have little, I want nothing: all my treasure is in Minerva’s tower...I live still a collegiate student...and lead a monastic life, ipse mihi theatrum [sufficient entertainment to myself], sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world...aulae vanitatem, fori ambitionem, ridere mecum soleo [I laugh to myself at the vanities of the court, the intrigues of public life], I laugh at all.

What a glut of books! Who can read them?

What no wife of a writer understands is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.

Indeed. I have often thought that when a man selects one word over another he often reveals far more of himself than he intended.

Gus: There are still bears out here. Black bears who feel no kinship to black men.

Quickly, the dragon came at him, encouraged As Beowulf fell back; its breath flared, And he suffered, wrapped around in swirling Flames -- a king, before, but now A beaten warrior. None of his comrades Came to him, helped him, his brave and noble Followers; they ran for their lives, fled Deep in a wood. And only one of them Remained, stood there, miserable, remembering, As a good man must, what kinship should mean.

No cord or cable can draw so forcibly, or bind so fast, as [love] can do with a single thread.

I'd like to be born the son of a duke with 90,000 pounds a year, on an enormous estate.... And I'd like to have the most enormous library, and I'd like to think that I could read those books forever and forever, and die unlamented, unknown, unsung, unhonored - and packed with information.

That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It. It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible. It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one. The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.

Stain Boy Of all the super heroes, the strangest one by far, doesn't have a special power, or drive a fancy car. next to Superman and batman, I guess he must seem tame. But to me he is quite special, and Stain Boy is his name. He can't fly around tall buildings, or outrun a speeding train, the only talent he seems to have is to leave a nasty stain. Sometimes I know it bothers him, that he can't run or swim or fly, and because of this one ability, his dry cleaning bill is sky-high.

You dance really well.” “I took ballet lessons.” She tilted her head back to search his face, certain he was joking. “You did not.” “I did. Several of us on the team did. Good for coordination.” Resisting the laugh that bubbled up in her throat, she said, “Somehow I can’t picture you in tights and a tutu.” But he did laugh. “We made sure no one with a camera got within miles of the studio.

Robot Boy Mr. an Mrs. Smith had a wonderful life. They were a normal, happy husband and wife. One day they got news that made Mr. Smith glad. Mrs. Smith would would be a mom which would make him the dad! But something was wrong with their bundle of joy. It wasn't human at all, it was a robot boy! He wasn't warm and cuddly and he didn't have skin. Instead there was a cold, thin layer of tin. There were wires and tubes sticking out of his head. He just lay there and stared, not living or dead. The only time he seemed alive at all was with a long extension cord plugged into the wall. Mr. Smith yelled at the doctor, "What have you done to my boy? He's not flesh and blood, he's aluminum alloy!" The doctor said gently, "What I'm going to say will sound pretty wild. But you're not the father of this strange looking child. You see, there still is some question about the child's gender, but we think that its father is a microwave blender." The Smith's lives were now filled with misery and strife. Mrs. Smith hated her husband, and he hated his wife. He never forgave her unholy alliance: a sexual encounter with a kitchen appliance. And Robot Boy grew to be a young man. Though he was often mistaken for a garbage can.

You see, people in the depressive position are often stigmatised as ‘failures' or ‘losers'. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. If these people are in the depressive position, it is most probably because they have tried too hard or taken on too much, so hard and so much that they have made themselves ‘ill with depression'. In other words, if these people are in the depressive position, it is because their world was simply not good enough for them. They wanted more, they wanted better, and they wanted different, not just for themselves, but for all those around them. So if they are failures or losers, this is only because they set the bar far too high. They could have swept everything under the carpet and pretended, as many people do, that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds. But unlike many people, they had the honesty and the strength to admit that something was amiss, that something was not quite right. So rather than being failures or losers, they are just the opposite: they are ambitious, they are truthful, and they are courageous. And that is precisely why they got ‘ill'. To make them believe that they are suffering from some chemical imbalance in the brain and that their recovery depends solely or even mostly on popping pills is to do them a great disfavour: it is to deny them the precious opportunity not only to identify and address important life problems, but also to develop a deeper and more refined appreciation of themselves and of the world around them—and therefore to deny them the opportunity to fulfil their highest potential as human beings.

[E]very man hath liberty to write, but few ability. Heretofore learning was graced by judicious scholars, but now noble sciences are vilified by base and illiterate scribblers, that either write for vain-glory, need, to get money, or as Parasites to flatter and collogue with some great men, they put out trifles, rubbish and trash. Among so many thousand Authors you shall scarce find one by reading of whom you shall be any whit better, but rather much worse; by which he is rather infected than any way perfected… What a catalogue of new books this year, all his age (I say) have our Frankfurt Marts, our domestic Marts, brought out. Twice a year we stretch out wits out and set them to sale; after great toil we attain nothing…What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast Chaos and confusion of Books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning. For my part I am one of the number—one of the many—I do not deny it...