Quotes from Jack London

Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.

To be able to forget means sanity.

And how have I lived? Frankly and openly, though crudely. I have not been afraid of life. I have not shrunk from it. I have taken it for what it was at its own valuation. And I have not been ashamed of it. Just as it was, it was mine.

But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called -- called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.

But I am I. And I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind

He was a silent fury who no torment could tame.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.

Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him on.

It's better to stand by someone's side than by yourself

Ever bike? Now that's something that makes life worth living!...Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds, avoiding collisions, at twenty miles or more an hour, and wondering all the time when you're going to smash up. Well, now, that's something! And then go home again after three hours of it...and then to think that tomorrow I can do it all over again!

Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.

Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time.

White Fang knew the law well: to oppress the weak and obey the strong.

He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.

...in his gambling, he had one besetting weakness -- faith in a system; and this made his damnation certain.