Quotes from Derek Raymond

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

A quick butchers shows up Old Bill three-handed, also a particularly nasty female grass–-and if looks were acid baths the two she collects from us would reduce her to gristle quicker than Mrs. Durand-Deacon.

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

I knocked at a second-floor flat in a dreary house, one of two hundred in a dreary Catford street.

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

He still didn't believe we could do it to him, and left with the assured insolence of a credit card presenting itself at the thin mouth of hell.

killers are like the army, dull and dangerous simultaneously.

It's like the tragedy of the whole world in a little glass,' she said. 'Great things are all smashed to pulp, and none of us who are left have the spirit to carry on.

Where I go, the ghosts go. I go where the evil is.

All the evil in the world is powerless against intelligence and courage.

I said to myself – wait for me in hell, I'll come to you.

There are times, I don't know if they come to everyone, when I feel that the future is beyond my strength: too much horror to deal with and no help to turn to.

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.

I looked at this man. He was in his fifites, mostly bones inside hisblack suit, and gave off an odour, if you were as close up to him as I was, of a long-closed keyboard opened suddenly in an empty house. (73)

I looked at this man. He was in his fifties, mostly bones inside his black suit, and gave off an odour, if you were as close up to him as I was, of a long-closed keyboard opened suddenly in an empty house. (73)

Existence is sometimes what a forward artillery observer sees of enemy lines through field glasses. A distant and troubling view brought suddenly into focus with a wealth of obscene detail.

The eternal cycle, the beginning, middle and end of a human being, the incomprehensible dance in the magic of our own theatre will continue forever. But ignorance of our birth and death makes us largely mad; the majority of us clap at our disasters as though they are a play: but it is a work we cannot possibly understand.