John the Savage Quotes

If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then, I ate my own wickedness.

You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them...But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.

Nothing costs enough here.

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

Isn’t there something in living dangerously?

″‘Listen, I beg you,’ cried the Savage earnestly. ‘Lend me your ears...’ He had never spoken in public before, and found it very difficult to express what he wanted to say. ‘Don’t take that horrible stuff. It’s poison, it’s poison.’ Poison to soul as well as body.‘”

“Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?”

He would have liked to say something about solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into shadowy darkness, about death. He would have liked to speak; but there were no words. Not even in Shakespeare.