Derek Raymond Quotes & Sayings

Death is its own best friend, and our dreams know it. — Derek Raymond

Perhaps, when it got utterly dark, the peace of the darkness would become the same as light so that my last experience would become as mysterious and musical as my first, so that in my last darkness there might not be the same need of understanding anything so far away as the world anymore. — Derek Raymond

I have taken a terrible beating from the truth and feel tamed, wise and desperate, as if I had taken a short route to wisdom through a mirror, and cut myself badly on it as I passed through. — Derek Raymond

As soon as he was half-awake he slipped his knickers off. Holding them close to his face, he handled them loosely for a moment with an absent expression, then suddenly buried his nose in them, his dark eyes huge, his face monstrous with the wisdom of evil. As well as the blood and the seepage from last night's ejaculation he had shit himself lavishly in his sleep, a sloppy, yellow liquid. Having spent a while burying his face in them, he folded the knickers up and put them carefully to one side on top of a stack of others. He would never wash them; he would never wear them again. Every secretion that had occurred in his underclothes, before, during, or sometimes just after a moment of action was a souvenir to be preciously kept and safeguarded. — Derek Raymond

She doesn't think she's worthy to live. But she doesn't realize, she is life. — Derek Raymond

You Englishmen,' said Herr Wurter. 'You are all the same. Wherever you are you behave as if you were at home and your word was law. — Derek Raymond

I've come to believe that what we need is a republic. People need to be run by people who like them, not boxed into a game they can't win by people who can't lose it. We need a head of state who's been on the run. An interior minister who's had the two o'clock knock and done solitary. A minister of agriculture who's seen a spade fired in anger and done twenty years on the land. A health minister who's had his life saved through swift transportation to a well-staffed, properly equipped hospital. An interior minister dedicated to dismantling the state with its futile bureaucratic waste and saving real money. And a police force that would put an end to the Bowmans of this world. — Derek Raymond

It's wearying, like Caliban buttonholing you in hell and telling you the struggle he's having getting along with himself. — Derek Raymond

Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap. — Derek Raymond

I studied him and realized that madness is the last defence of the mind when it can't hope to reconcile itself with events; I too was standing between routine and the unknowable. — Derek Raymond

I became as hard as whipcord, but with a brain like cottonwool. — Derek Raymond

Every day you amass knowledge in a frantic race against death that death must win. You want to find out everything in the time you have; yet in the end you wonder why you bothered, it'll all be lost. I keep trying to explain this to anyone who will listen. — Derek Raymond

It seems to me that no matter whether you marry, settle down or live with a bird or not, certain ones simply have your number on them, like bombs in the war; and even if you don't happen to like them all that much there's nothing you can do about it - unless you're prepared to spend a lifetime arguing fate out of existence, which you could probably do if you tried but I'm not the type.
- Crust on Its Uppers, p. 87 — Derek Raymond