Markus Wolf Quotes

It's funny, don't you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out.

I had to decide what I was going to do, and what I was going to be. I was standing there, waiting for someone to do something , till I realised the person I was waiting for was myself.

It is early, early morning. It's that time when it's still dark but you know the day is coming. Blue is bleeding through black. Stars are dying.

Do we spend most of our days trying to remember or to forget? Do we spend most of our time running towards or away from our lives?

But neither of us knows, because a fight's worth nothing if you know from the start that you're going to win it.

And then there's the sickness I feel from looking at legs I can't touch, or at lips that don't smile at me. Or hips that don't reach for me. And hearts that don't beat for me.

There are moments when you can only stand and stare, watching the world forget you as you remove yourself from it - when you overcome it and cease to exist as the person you were.

There are so many moments to remember and sometimes I think that maybe we're not really people at all. Maybe moments are what we are.... Sometimes I just survive. But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.

It makes me wonder, Do we spend most of our days trying to remember or forget things? Do we spend most of our time running towards or away from our lives? I don't know.

Sometimes I just survive. But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.

Things always seem to glide away. They come to you, stay a moment, then leave again.

You can do anything when it's not real. When it is real, nothing breaks your fall. Nothing gets between you and the ground.

I looked at myself in that window, oblivious to all the people around me and I stared and smiled that particular smile. You know that smile that seems to knock you and tell you how pathetic you are? That's the smile I was smiling.

If her soul ever leaks, I want it to land on me.

I wanted to drown inside a woman in the feeling and drooling of the love I could give her. I wanted her pulse to crush me with its intensity. That's what I wanted. That's what I wanted myself to be.

So I saw that there was only me. There was only me who could worry about what was happening here, inside these walls of my life. Other people had their own worlds to worry about, and in the end, they had to fend for themselves, just like us.

... because a fight's worth nothing if you know from the start that you're going to win it. It's the ones in between that test you. They're the ones that bring questions with them.

A fighter can be a winner, but that doesn't make a winner a fighter.

The city buildings in the distance are holding up the sky, it seems.

I'm gonna hunt my life down and grab it.

Because you don't learn anything unless you can find the patience to read. TV takes that away from you. It robs you from your mind.

At first, all is black and white. Black on white. That's where I'm walking, through pages. These pages. Sometimes it gets so that I have one foot in the pages and the words, and the other in what they speak of.

Disbelief held me down inside my footsteps, making my body heavy but my heart wild.

Something I'd like to be perfect at? ... Loving you,' I said. The words climbed from my mouth. 'I'd want to be perfect at loving you.

It’s funny, don’t you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out.

Shadows of cloud lurked in the water, like holes the sun forgot about.

The pages and the words are my world, spread out before your eyes and for your hand to touch. Vaguely, I can see you face looking down into me, as I look back. Do you see my eyes?

I say, 'Don't lose your heart, Rube.' And very clearly, without moving, my brother answers me. He says, 'I'm not tryin' to lose it, Cam. I'm tryin' to find it.

My own eyes try to sleep, but they don't. They stay wide awake as time snarls forward and silence drops down, like measured thought.

It's not so much that the old friend is a better friend. It's just that you know the person better, and you know they don't really care if you're acting like a poor, grovelling idiot. They know you would do the same for them.

Very quickly, very suddenly, words fell through my mind. They landed on the floor of my thoughts, and in there, down there, I started to pick the words up. They were excerpts of truth gathered from inside me.

The city was dark except for the building lights that seemed to appear like sores - like bandaids had been ripped off to expose the city's skin.

I just know that right now, we want to be proud. For once. We want to take the struggle and rise above it. We want to frame it, live it, survive it. We want to put it in our mouths and taste it and never forget it, because it makes us strong.

Time will tell, I suppose, or at least, these pages will.

Very suddenly. Yes, quite suddenly, I didn't feel like I could handle my feeling of aloneness.

I s'pose, I can't have it all my own way, can I? You can't drown in a person unless they let you.

For a moment, I debated whether I should tell someone about the words I'd started writing down, but I couldn't. In a way, I felt ashamed, even though my writing was the one thing that whispered okayness in my ear. I didn't speak it, to anyone.

I stood there and stared, into the sky and at the city around me. I stood, hands at my side, and I saw what had happened to me and who I was and the way things would always be for me. Truth. There was no more wishing, or wondering. I knew who I was, and what I would always do. I believed it, as my teeth touched and my eyes were overrun.

Make sure you live,' she said. 'As decent as you can. I know you'll make mistakes, but sometimes you're meant to, okay?

As I make my way through, I feel okayness reaching through me. The funny thing is that okayness is not a real word. It's not in the dictionary. But it's in me.

Smile with instinct, then lick your wounds in the darkest of dark corners. Trace the scars back to your own fingers and remember them.

I guess when someone tells you something they they usually guard, you feel privileged, not because you know something no-one else knows, but because you feel chosen. You feel like that person wants her life to intersect with yours. I think that's what felt best about it.

It feels like spoken words, this bridge. I want it but fear it. God, I want so desperately to reach the other side - just like I want the words. I want my words to build bridges strong enough to walk on. I want them to tower over the world so I can stand up on them and walk to the other side.

The happening that happened was that I met this girl ...

Can a wolfe be beautiful?

I've wandered through the real world, and written myself through the darkness of the streets inside me. I see people walking through the city and wonder where they've been, and what the moments of their lives have done to them. If they're anything like me, their moments have held them up and shot them down. Sometimes I just survive. But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more. That's when the stories show up in me. They find me all the time. They're made of underdogs and fighters. They're made of hunger and desire and trying to live decent. The only trouble is, I don't know which of those stories comes first. Maybe they all just merge into one. We'll see, I guess. I'll let you know when I decide.

See, Cameron. The only things I care about in this life are me, you, Mum, Dad, Steve and Sarah. And maybe Miffy. The rest of the world means nothing to me. The rest of the world can rot.' Am I like that too?' You? No way.' There's a slight gap in his words. 'And that's your problem. You care about everything.' He's right. I do.

But neither of us knows, because a fight's worth nothing if you know from the beginning that you're going to win. It's the ones in between that test you. They're the ones that bring questions with them.

The only people we want to blame are ourselves, because it will be ourselves that we rely upon.

How'd it feel?" Rube asked himself. "I don't know exactly, but it made me want to howl.

It's the sound of my breathing that gets me, pouring down into my lungs and then tripping back up my throat.

As we walk back, it feels like the city is engulfing us. Adrenalin still pours through our veins. Sparks flow through to our fingers. We've still been running in the mornings, but the city's different then. It's filled with hope and with bristles of winter sunshine. In the evening, it's like it dies, waiting to be born again the next morning.

He's been to the brink and come back. I guess when you lose your pride, even for just a moment, you realise how much it means to you.

Awkward. That's exactly how it was when we walked over to our sister and stood on each side of her, looking at her and feeling things and not knowing what to do.

Not a beauty queen. Not one of those. You know the ones. She was real.

A happening was looming. It was out there somewhere beyond the regular enclosed life that I had been living. It was out there, not waiting, but existing. Being. Perhaps it was only slightly wondering if I would come to it.

Best friends one, and now we have almost nothing to say to each other. It was interesting, how he had joined those guys and I just stayed on my own. I didn't like it or dislike it. It was just funny that things had turned out that way.

All four of us were young and undaunted and our smiles were so strong that it made me smile even then on the couch, with a kind of loss.

I wanted nothing for free. Nothing came for free at our place anyway.

The word maybe was beginning to annoy me, because the only thing that was fixed was that maybe would be with me forever.

I bet that guy was as obsessed with Sarah as I am with this other girl, and I bet he promised himself never to hurt her, just like I've been doin' - and look what he's done to her. He's left her a crumpled mess, lyin' on her bed all the time.

I walked home, seeing all my doubt from the other side. Have you ever seen that? Like when you go on holiday. On the way back, everything is the same but it looks a little different than it did on the way. It's because you're seeing it backwards.

I'd seen glimpses of a different me. It was a different me because in those increments of time I thought I actually became a winner. The truth, however, is painful. It was a truth that told me with a scratching internal brutality that I was me, and that winning wan't natural for me. It had to be fought for, in the echoes and trodden footprints of my mind. In a way, I had to scavenge for moments of alrightness.

Our own place is mall perhaps, but when your old man is eaten by his own shadow, you realise that maybe in every house, something so savage and sad and brilliant is standing up, without the world even seeing it. Maybe that's what these pages of words are about: Bringing the world to the window.

There were thousands of households throughout that city and there was something happening in all of them. There was some kind of story in each, but self-contained. No one else knew. No one else cared.

Would I always feel so small that it hurt and that even the greatest outcry roaring from my throat was, in reality, just a whimper? Would my footsteps always stop so suddenly and sink into the footpath?

My mouth opened. It happened. Yes, with my head thrown into the sky, I started howling. Arms stretched out next to me, I howled, and everything came out of me. Visions pored up my throat and past voices surrounded me. The sky listened. The city didn't. I didn't care. All I cared about was that I was howling so that I could hear my voice and so I would remember that the boy had intensity and something to offer. I howled, oh, so loud and desperate, telling a world that I was here and I wouldn't lie down.

... I felt something and vowed that if I ever got a girl I would treat her right and never be bad or dirty to her or hurt her, ever. I vowed it and had all the confidence in the world that I would keep the vow.

We smell the impact of traffic and humans. Humans and traffic. Back and forth. We taste our moment, swallowing it, knowing it. We feel our nerves twitching inside our stomaches, lunging at our skin from beneath.

He was into the skating culture now and I was into, well, I'm not sure what I was into. I was into roaming around on my own, and I enjoyed it.

The thing is, I don't even hate cops. To tell you the truth, I actually feel a little sorry for them.

He was tall and abrupt and exactly the kind of guy you wanted to be walking the streets with.

I could smell something. Fear. I could taste it now. It tasted like blood in my mouth, and I could feel it slide through me and open me up when I saw him ...

One good punch from Rube on me would send the sky into my head and the clouds into my lungs. I just always tried to stay up.

Well, this is basically the end, so the answers should be in these next few pages. I doubt they will surprise you, but you never know. I don't know how smart or thick you are. You could be Albert Einstein for all I know, or some literary prizewinner, or maybe you're just middle of the road like me.

They're brainless girls, otherwise they wouldn't be seen dead here. They're pretty, with ugly, appealing smiles and conversations we can't hear. They breathe smoke and blow it out, and words drop from their mouths and get crushed to the floor. Or they get discarded, just to glow with warmth for a moment, for someone else to tread on later.

We are wolves, which are wild dogs, and this is our place in the city. We are small and our house is small on our small urban street. We can see the city and the train line and it's beautiful in its own dangerous way. Dangerous because it's shared and taken and fought for. That's the best way I can put it, and thinking about it, when I walk past the tiny houses on our street, I wonder about the stories inside them. I wonder hard, because houses must have walls and rooftops for a reason. My only query is the windows. Why do they have windows? Is it to let a glimpse of the world in? Or for us to see out?

I kept walking. Have you ever done that? Just walk. Just walk and have no idea where you're going? It wasn't a good feeling, but not a bad one either. I felt caged and free at the same time, like it was only myself that wouldn't allow me to feel either great or miserable.

You ever hear a dog cry, Steve? You know, howling so loud it's almost unbearable?' He nodded. 'I reckon they howl like that because they're so hungry it hurts, and that's what I feel in me every day of my life. I'm so hungry to be somethin' - to be somebody. You hear me?' He did. 'I'm not lyin' down ever. Not for you. Not for anyone.' I ended it. 'I'm hungry, Steve.' Sometimes I think they're the best words I've ever said. 'I'm hungry.

But for now, happiness throws stones. It guards itself. I wait.

A couple of them were school beauty-queen pretty while a few were that more real-looking type. A realer kind of pretty.

Don’t think, I told myself. Think nothingness. But even nothingness was something. It was a thought.

And when we finally stood up and turned to face the world, I could feel something climbing through me. I could feel it on its hands and knees inside me, rising up, rising up - and I smiled. I smiled, thinking, The hunger, because I knew it all too well. The hunger. The desire. Then, slowly, as we walked on, I felt the beauty of it, and I could taste it, like words inside my mouth.

See, I was never a guy who had a whole heap of friends to belong to. Besides Greg Fienni, I never really had friends. I kind of stayed on my own. I hated it, but I was proud of it too. Cameron Wolfe needed no one. He didn't need to be amongst a pack. Not all of us roam like that. No, all he needed was his instincts. All he needed was himself.

Around us I can sniff out a savagery in the noisy southern air. It knifes it's way into my nose, but I do not bleed blood. It's fear I bleed, and it gushes out over my lip. I wipe it away, in a hurry.

I told her I loved the howling sound of her harmonica. That seemed to be the limit of my courage that night, and even those spoken words had to struggle their way out of my mouth. It's all very well for words to build bridges, but sometimes I think it's a matter of knowing when to do it. Knowing when the time's right.

I never did get around to praying for myself, did I? Maybe that's what was behind it, though. Myself. Maybe the only reason I'd prayed for others to begin with was to bring myself good fortune. Was that true? Was it?

I don't really know that this story has a whole lot of things happen in it. It doesn't really. It's just a record of how things were in my life during this last winter. I guess things happened, but nothing out of the ordinary.

We don't need a point, son. We're juvenile, we're dirty, we don't have girls, we have noses full of snot, throats sore as hell, we've got scabs on us, we suffer bouts of acne, we've got no girls ... What more reasons do we need?

... tried praying for him ...but I couldn't. I just couldn't. Don't ask me why. I hoped that he was okay, but I couldn't summon the strength to pray for it.

I think only one thing. Where 's Octavia? As I get closer to the bottom, I notice that it's water that I'm falling into. It's salty-green and smooth, until... I'm driven through the surface and go deeper. I'm surrounded. I'm drowning. I think. I'm drowning. But I'm smiling too.

Why do they have windows? Is it to let a glimpse of the world in? Or for us to see out? Our own place is small perhaps, but when your old man is eaten up by his own shadow, you realize maybe that in every house, something so savage and sad and brilliant is standing up, without the world even seeing it. Maybe that's what these pages of words are about. Bringing the world to the window.

Very quickly, very suddenly, words fell through my mind. They landed on the floor of my thoughts, an in there, down there, I started to pick the words up. They were excerpts of truth gathered from inside me. Even in the night, in bed, they woke me. They painted themselves onto the ceiling. They burned themselves onto the sheets of memory laid out in my mind. When I woke up the next day, I wrote the words down , on a torn-up piece of paper. And to me, the world changed color that morning.

What is it about the sound of clapping hands? Why does it seem like an ocean of sound, breaking like waves on top of you? Why does it make a tide turn in you? Maybe it’s because it’s one of the most noble things humans do with their hands. I mean, humans make fists with their hands. They use them to hurt each other and steal things. When humans clap, it’s the one time they stand together and applaud other humans. I think they’re there to keep things. They hold moments together, to remember.

I thought for a moment about the dog. Miffy. I guess no matter how much Rube and I complained about him, we knew we'd sort of miss him if something happened to him. It's funny how there are things in this world that do nothing but annoy you, but you know you'd miss them when they're gone. Miffy, the Pomeranian wonderdog, was one such thing.

And you're Cameron Wolfe. That' gotta start meaning somethin' boy. That's gotta start churnin' inside us, making us wanna be someone for those names, and not just another couple of guys who amounted to nothin' but what people said we would. No way. We're getting' out of that. We have to. We're gonna crawl and moan and fight and bite and bark at anything that gets in our way or tries to hunt us down and shoot us. All right?

I tell me: Let these words be footsteps, because I have a long way to travel. Let the words walk the dirty streets. Let them make their way across the crying grass. Let them stand and breathe and pant smoke in winter evenings. And when they're tired and have fallen down, let them buckle to their feet ad arc around me, watchful. I want these words to be actions. Give them flesh and bones, I say to me, and eyes of hunger and desire, so they can write and fight me through the night.

When I’m there, Rube’s eyes fire into mine. Make sure you get up, they tell me, and I nod, then jump up. The jacket’s off. My skin’s warm. My wolfish hair sticks up as always, nice and thick. I’m ready now. I’m ready to keep standing up, no matter what, I’m ready to believe that I welcome the pain and that I want it so much that I will look for it. I will seek it out. I’ll run to it and throw myself into it. I’ll stand in front of it in blind terror and let it beat me down and down till my courage hangs off me in rags. Then it will dismantle me and stand me up naked, beat me some more and my slaughter-blood will fly from my mouth and the pain will drink it, feel it, steal it and conceal it in the pockets of its guts and it will taste me. It will just keep standing me up, and I won’t let it know. I won’t tell it that I feel it. I won’t give it the satisfaction. No, the pain will have to kill me.

Значи това било. Руб е победител. Но не иска да бъде такъв. Иска преди всичко да бъде боец. Като нас. Да играе мач, който може да загуби. Отговарям му, за да го успокоя: - Пак ще се биеш, като всички нас. - Мислиш ли? Но никой от нас не знае, защото мачът не струва пукната пара, ако си сигурен от самото начало, че ще спечелиш. Истинското изпитание са онези, чийто изход не знаеш. Тъкмо те поставят въпроси и искат отговор. Руб още не се е бил. Не е играл истински мач. - Когато ми се случи, дали ще се изправя? - пита той. - Не знам - признавам си. Той предпочита хиляди пъти да е боец във вълчата глутница, отколкото единствен победител в целия свят. - Кажи ми как се прави - моли ме той. - Кажи ми! Но и двамата разбираме, че има неща, на които никой не може да те научи. Боецът може да бъде победител, но това не прави задължително победителя боец.

The Charcoal Sky Sometimes you go to the wrong place, but the right way comes and finds you. It might make you trip over it or speak to it. Or it might come to you when a day is stripped apart by night and ask you to take its hand and forget this wrong place, this illusion where you stand. I think of this mess in my mind and the girl who walked through it to stand before me and let her voice come close. I remember brick walls. There are moments when you can only stand and stare, watching the world forget you as you remove yourself from it - when you overcome it and cease to exist as the person you were. It calls your name, but you're gone. You hear nothing. See nothing. You've gone somewhere else. You've gone somewhere to find a different definition of yourself, and it's a place where nothing else can touch you. Nothing else can swing on your thoughts. It's only yourself, flat against the charcoal sky, for one moment. Then flat on the earth again, where the world doesn't recognize you anymore. Your name is what it always was. You look and sound like you always did, yet you're not the same, and when a city wind begins to call you, it's voice doesn't only hit the edges. It connects. It blows into you rather than in spite of you. Sometimes you feel like it's calling out for you.