Rage Quotes

“I kept a straight face while my inner Neanderthal spluttered and then went on a mental rampage through a hypothetical produce section, knocking over shelves and spattering fruit everywhere in sheer frustration, screaming, 'JUST TELL ME WHOSE SKULL TO CRACK WITH MY CLUB, DAMMIT!”
― Jim Butcher, Cold Days

“Craziness is only a matter of degree, and there are lots of people besides me who have the urge to roll heads. They go to stock-car races and the horror movies and the wrestling matches they have in Portland Expo. Maybe what she said smacked of all those things, but I admired her for saying out loud, all the same--the price of honesty is always high. She had an admirable grasp of the fundamentals. Besides, she was tiny and pretty.”
― Richard Bachman, Rage

“...and she's thinking of rage, like an ember or a burning acid swallowing up her knotted viscera. Blindness like the kind that leads men to perpetrate horrors, animal drunkenness, the jungles of the mind.”
― Alden Bell, The Reapers are the Angels

“Rage is love...twisted in on itself. Rage reaches into the world when we can no longer contain the hurt of being treated as if our life and loves do not matter. Rage, and its consequences, are what we get when the world refuses to change for anything less.”
― Evan Winter, The Fires of Vengeance

“By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“There was an agelessness about him, a stillness; on Roose Bolton's face, rage and joy looked much the same.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“I am...sad and angry. Why is my spirit so sad and angry? I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage.”
― Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital

“Your body is full of rage. Every sinew. It is easy to read. You speak volumes with a clenched fist.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities

“Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“He was a heavy breather. You could hear him puffing and blowing into the mike up there like some large and sweaty animal. I don't like that, never have. My father is like that on the telephone. A lot of heavy breathing in your ear, so you can almost smell the scotch and Pall Malls on his breath. It always seems unsanitary and somehow homosexual.”
― Richard Bachman, Rage

“All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed. Because in addition to that feeling, that disintegration, there was rage. I wanted to break something.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“You've got a shitty habit, you know it? I've noticed it on all those TV drive-safely pitches that you do. You breathe in people's ears. You sound like a stallion in heat, Philbrick. That's a shitty habit. You also sound like you're reading off a teleprompter, even when you're not. You ought to take care of stuff like that. You might save a life.”
― Richard Bachman, Rage

“What does it mean to demonstrate in the streets, what is the significance of that collective activity so symptomatic of the twentieth century? In stupefaction Ulrich watches the demonstrators from the window; as they reach the foot of the palace, their faces turn up, turn furious, the men brandish their walking sticks, but “a few steps farther, at a bend where the demonstration seemed to scatter into the wings, most of them were already dropping their greasepaint: it would be absurd to keep up the menacing looks where there were no more spectators.” In the light of that metaphor, the demonstrators are not men in a rage; they are actors performing rage! As soon as the performance is over they are quick to drop their greasepaint! Later, in the 1960s, philosophers would talk about the modern world in which everything had turned into spectacle: demonstrations, wars, and even love; through this “quick and sagacious penetration” (Fielding), Musil had already long ago discerned the “society of spectacle.”
― Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts

“On faith’s battered back calm eyes etch prayers that cool a nation’s hot rage.”
― Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams

“…the only thing she feared was compromise, the soothing voice that licks down rage until it is nothing but a small smooth lump in your hand.”
― Selby Wynn Schwartz, After Sappho

“But his mind saw nothing of all this. His mind was engaged in a warfare of the gods. His mind paced outwards over no-man's-land, over the fields of the slain, paced to the rhythm of the blood's red bugles. To be alone and evil! To be a god at bay. What was more absolute?”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“Qualsiasi persona normale di tanto in tanto prova la tentazione di sputarsi nelle mani, issare la bandiera nera e cominciare a tagliare le gole.”
― H. L. Mencken

“My music teacher offered twittering madrigals and something about how, in Italy, in Italy, the oranges hang on the tree. He treated me - the humiliation of it - as a soprano.

These, by contrast, are the six elements of a Sacred Harp alto: rage, darkness, motherhood, earth, malice, and sex. Once you feel it, you can always do it. You know where to go for it, though it will cost you.”
― Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd

“I am content to say that caught as I was, without rescuers as I was in that moment, there was a fierce, dark fury moving through me, wave upon wave, like the sea itself, that was bizarrely a comfort. My face maybe showing only a shadow of it, as faces will . . .

Rage, dark rage, lightened by nothing.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“We shouldn’t be forced to choose at all. The fury in Aida’s voice was familiar. Nostalgic. I’d once possessed that strain of fury, as had my fellow cooks, my friends, my produce guy, a virulent rage against our tainted inheritance of this stupid, smog-choked planet. But it couldn’t last. We’d been inoculated from rage by other, more immediate concerns. For example: how to pay rent, how to stay alive. Aida, rich as she was, hadn’t been forced to choose between anger and dinner. For the first time in years, I tasted, through her, that feeling.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“I do not need a tongue for her to read the rage in my eyes.”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“I was as much scared as angry, but where does a slave put anger? We could be angry with one another; we were human. But the real source of our rage had to go without address, swallowed, repressed.”
― Percival Everett, James

“I gave you rage,” he said. “You turned it into discipline. Do not forget your fury.”
― Elijah Stepanovich, The Heir of Ash and Thunder

“Why not just do them all a favour and blow your fucking head off?”
― Peter Volkofsky, Mia's Magic Wand

“I was raised on rage and resilience, on stories never meant to be spoken aloud. But I refuse to carry their weight as my own. I will not inherit silence disguised as strength.”
― Hazel Briar, Whiskey Chaser

“For weeks now a rage
has possessed my body, driving
now out upon men and women
now inward upon myself
Walking Amsterdam Avenue
I find myself in tears
without knowing which thought
forced water to my eyes
To speak to another human
becomes a risk”
― Adrienne Rich, Diving Into the Wreck

“Anger that grows in the soil of deprivation is a holy fruit, while that which is sewn in the soil of overabundance grows crooked and full of poison.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction

“The bombing was new but the amorphous rage that sought a target was not. Sailor could feel it constantly vibrating beneath everything, like an approaching train that sets the rails humming. Soon it would come for them too.”
― Emma Sloley, The Island of Last Things

“Talks pursued under influence of alcohol and rage do not lead to anything good”
― Sapan Saxena, The Oath of Shakuni

“Forget rage, we don’t even have to ‘fight back’ against the machine. But we do have to perform one, all-important mind maneuver:

We must reclaim our attention and consciously choose a new way to focus it that is both self-directed and empowering.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality