Gould's Book Of Fish Quotes

So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them?

Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.

Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations—that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls.

Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than what we have been told. Maybe evolution has been going on in reverse longer than I suspect, and we are already sad, dumb fish.

-to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!

definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others. I had endured too much to be reduced to an idea. Onto that pyre I threw so many, many words - that entire untrue literature of the past which had shackled & subjugated my as surely as the spiked iron collars & leg locks & jagged basils & balls & chains & headshaving - that had so long denied me my free voice & the stories I needed to tell. I no longer wished to read lies as to who & why I was. I knew who I was

...& she, armed with both & abandoning the joys of reason that had meant so much to her as well as me, made a suitably advantageous marriage with an ironmonger with a face like an anvil & a soul like a slag, & so I never saw her freckles fade, her auburn hair dull, never had to watch our love turn to that non-colour, white.

And when I had finished painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder & beauty left to go round as each fish was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking & plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming ever more impoverished of love & wonder & beauty in consequence, what, in the end, would be left?

The only people who believe in straight roads are generals & mail coach drivers.

He was… a lost apostrophe in search of a word to which he might belong

Under the influence of mercury, which he administered to himself daily as a salve for his syphilis, & laudanum, which he drank each evening in imprecisely measured amounts to enable him to sleep, because of all things, this brave man feared only his dreams, opiate-enhanced nightmares that gave him no respite & which always ended in flames from which he rose phoenix-like just before dawn each morning, to recommence building what was already ash.

The sum of such chaos was that I seemed to be reading a book that never really started and never quite finished.

Once upon a time...long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us.

A coat hanger of a body trying to remember the coat that years before had fallen off

I had begun with the comforting conclusion that books are the tongue of divine wisdom, and had ended only with the thin hunch that all books are grand follies, destined forever to be misunderstood.

The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security—national, individual, spiritual—wasn’t a bad joke being played on them by a bored and capricious destiny. To be told that there was no connection between then and now, that they didn't need to wear a black armband or have a bad conscience about their power and their wealth and everybody else’s lack of it; to feel rotten that no-one could or would explain why the wealth of a few seemed so curiously dependent on the misery of the many. We kindly pretended that it was about buying and selling chairs, about them asking questions about price and heritage, and us replying in like manner. But it wasn’t about price and heritage, it wasn’t about that at all. The tourists had insistent, unspoken questions and we just had to answer as best we could, with forged furniture. They were really asking, 'Are we safe?' and we were really replying, 'No, but a barricade of useless goods may help block the view.' And because hubris is not just an ancient Greek word but a human sense so deep-seated we might better regard it as an unerring instinct, they were also wanting to know, 'If it is our fault, then will we suffer?' and we were really replying, 'Yes, and slowly, but a fake chair may make us both feel better about it.

The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or sorrow or wonder than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now.

Coconut trees were fireworks that arced into the sky and exploded in green. Pandanus trees, angular and mop-headed, seemed cut from the pages of a Dr. Seuss book. Breadfruit trees cast generous shadows. The lagoon, never more than twenty feet away, fulfilled every postcard cliché of tropical paradise. On the beach, muscular island men were beaching their wooden sailing canoe after a morning on the water, strings sagging with the weight of colorful reef fish.

I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species & phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish (201).

How can power and ignorance sleep together?

Thus attired in the night of their grief, they prepared to depart into a morning she seemed determined not to relinquish.

For beneath that delicate black powder something highly unusual was happening: the book’s marbled cover was giving off a faint, but increasingly bright purple glow.

The story enchanted me, and I took to carrying the book with me everywhere, as if it were some powerful talisman, as if it contained some magic that might somehow convey or explain something fundamental to me.

Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation & reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults & is easily ivied over with paid praises

To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping.

Stories as written are progressive, sentence must build upon sentence as brick upon brick, yet the beauty of this life in its endless mystery is circular. Sun & moon, spheres endlessly circling. Black man, full circle; white man, bisected circle; life, the third circle, on & on, & round & round.

He had come from the humblest of backgrounds, born in a cottage he had built with his own hands

Please don’t ask how I know such things, please: where fish are concerned I know everything - or as good as - & besides, it’s rude to interrupt when I am in the middle of telling you how that sorry crumpled dory began to flare up

I just wanted to tell a story of love & it was about fish & it was about me & it was about everything

Billy Gould has always felt if something was worth doing, it was worth doing badly. Worry about doing it too well, he believed, & you may well be crippled by your ambition

His mode of speaking was largely incomprehensible, his tone was portentous, which is perhaps why he inevitably spoke in capital letters. Words existed in his speech as currants in a badly made bread-and-butter pudding - clusters of stodgy darkness

I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species and phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish

Perhaps if Tasmania had been a normal place where you had a proper job, spent hours in traffic in order to spend more hours in a normal crush of anxieties waiting to return to a normal confinement, and where no-one ever dreamt what it was like to be a seahorse, abnormal things like becoming a fish wouldn't happen to you.