Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by John Buchan

Quote by John Buchan

“It was pretty clear that he was mad, for madness means just this dislocation of the modes of thought which mortals have agreed upon as necessary to keep the world together.”

Quote by John Buchan

Work

The Three Hostages

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

John Buchan
John Buchan

John Buchan, born on August 26, 1875, and died on February 11, 1940, was a former Governor General of Canada and a renowned novelist and historian. He is best known for his historical novels and adventure stories, which have won the hearts of readers worldwide. more

You May Also Like

“Melrose Avenue, Santa Monica - Dialogue on a terrace. SHE: You are jealous ? Are you jealous ? You are fucking jealous! . . . Let me say . . . You 're twenty and I am forty-two, and I'll give my fucking ass to fucking anybody . . . Do you know that? * He gets up, crosses Melrose for no reason, comes back, kneels down in front of her (younger, but as theatrical). HE: Do you love me? Do you love me? SHE: Yes . . . Yes, I love you . . . The Italian kneads his meatballs. An Indian is playing a video game and its shrill soundtrack provides a backing to the conversation. The woman herself speaks in a shrill, hysterical voice. It is pleasant in Los Angeles in November, on the Melrose terrace, around the middle of the night. Everyone is smiling somewhere. No passion. A scene American-style. The waiter takes the car keys and drags off the woman, who shows off her black-stockinged legs and pretends to be mad. A black man gets up and, as he passes, says to me: ' Too much love! ' Gliding along the road that runs beside the coast in a black Porsche is like penetrating slowly into the inside of your own body.”

“Cancer: the code breaks down, becomes disorganized, lets cells proliferate indiscriminately. A disease of information. AIDS: the immune system (the secret defences of the body) is suppressed. Obsessive fear of contiguity, of flows (sperm, blood, saliva), of contact. A disease of communication. What if all this reflected a brute, instinctive refusal of the flows of communic ation, of sperm, of sex, of words? If there were in all this an 'instinctive', vital resistance to the extension of flows and circuits - at the cost of a new mortal pathology, AIDS and cancer, which would ultimately be protecting us from something even more serious, or would at least be serving as an alarm signal? After all, neurosis is what man invents to protect him from madness.”

“Reality must be caught in the trap, we must move quicker than reality. Ideas, too, have to move faster than their shadows. But if they go too quickly, they lose even their shadows. No longer having even the shadow of an idea. ... Words move quicker than meaning, but if they go too quickly, we have madness: the ellipsis of meaning can make us lose even the taste for the sign. What are we to exchange this portion of shadow and labour against -- this saving of intellectual activity and patience? What can we sell it to the devil for? It is very difficult to say. We are, in fact, the orphans of a reality come too late, a reality which is itself, like truth, something registered only after the event.”

“Religion is the opium of the People. She had been made to repeat that parrot-wise when she was a child, but since living in England she had come to consider Karl Marx a dull bigot and had started to take an interest in the occult. But Meg's fluttering hands and crazed confession told her that the slogan was true. Religion and the supernatural were drugs: mental poisons to kill reason and create insanity.”

“The ABNORMAL individual today is the one who now lives only in a unilateral positive adherence to what he is or what he does. Total subjection and adjustment [gestell] (the perfectly normalized being). Countless individuals have gone over to reality, to their own reality, by eliminating all consideration of the dual and the insoluble. And the mystery of this positive crystallization, of this suspension of doubt about the real - necessarily real - world remains entire. This raises the whole question of the intelligence of Evil.”

“O corpo coletivo funciona como um corpo individual: se o sistema é neurótico, ele engendra espontaneamente estruturas autodestruidoras. Quando o inconsciente coletivo supervaloriza a maternidade através da mídia e da indústria do entretenimento - esses instrumentos de poder -, não se trata de amor pelo feminino ou de um ato de bondade global. A mãe portadora de todas as virtudes nada mais é do que o corpo coletivo que se prepara para a regressão fascista. O poder outorgado por um Estado doentio é forçosamente suspeito.”