John Wray Quotes & Sayings

Only a blind man could have lived through these last years without seeing what was bearing down upon us; so I made myself blind as I could manage. I wanted to believe the worst was behind me, and I found an easy way to make it so. I simply turned my back on what was coming. — John Wray

Regardless of what he was doing, no matter how candid or innocuous the photo, Haven always looked as though he'd just stopped screaming. — John Wray

Practically from birth - or so it seemed to him - he had been aware that the elegant, filigreed, eminently reasonable world around him was destined to collapse under its own weight, like some elaborate architectural folly; the obvious response, to any sensible observer, was to have as little to do with such a world as possible. — John Wray

If God had commanded Noah to build an ark for consumer goods instead of animals - and if Noah had been a drunken paranoiac - his ark might have resembled this apartment. — John Wray

ARE YOU LIVING THE LIFE THAT YOUR MAKER INTENDED?
Does your life lack the flavor, the crackle, the intensity you've hoped for?
Daily, we find ourselves bombarded by a thousand recommendations for extending the duration of our lives - exercise three times weekly! smoke in moderation! exchange sugar for saccharine! - but the truth is that time does not gain value by accruing. Time acquires value by being "spent," and spent freely. The longest life is not always the best one; in the marjority of cases, just the opposite.
If you are, in fact, living the life that your maker intended - it may be time to seek another maker. — John Wray

If you don't like the place where you find yourself, Waldemar, it pays to remember that you'll be somewhere else in just a moment. The place itself will be a different place. — John Wray

Something about Van has always brought late-night nature programming to mind. — John Wray

Harder still was the pretense her studies demanded: the need to dissemble, to parrot her professors' orthodoxies, to feign interest in theories that were of no use to her. — John Wray

His crimped hair was subtly frosted, making him look like a preacher in some California church - the kind with acoustic guitars and headset microphones and not much use for the actual Bible. — John Wray

My mother and I looked at each other then, full in the face, more frankly than we'd done since I was small. I realized with a jolt that I was taller than she was by at least half a foot. When on earth had that happened? The realization made me want to sit down on the stairs and cry. It seemed to signify something terrible about the world: something that couldn't - or mustn't- be put into words. And I could see, looking down into her startled, anxious face, that my mother felt exactly the same way. — John Wray

The world is a loony bin [...]. Luckily for us, our front door happens to be one of its exits. — John Wray

Trying to write, or talk - or think - without invoking time is like trying to make pancakes underwater. Time — John Wray

What then, is time?" asks the saint. "If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not." Neither the past nor the future, argues Augustine, truly exists - and the present is merely an instant. "The present of things past is memory," he writes; "the present of things present is perception; and the present of things future is expectation." Augustine's conclusion - never fully stated, but unmistakably implied - is that time is subjective. It exists in the mind alone, and nowhere else. — John Wray