This is a great big list of quotes that I’ve aggregated. I like quotes, maybe more than other people. That’s all I have to say. Bring about the quotes!
What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small penknife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt. – [Cormac McCarthy, The Road]
If you’re old enough to read, you’re old enough to behave. – [Stephen King]
Well, my mouth’s connected to my brain, an’ my brain’s not really connected. – [Wylie, 100 Bullets]
Two things are not debatable: eroticism, and comedy. If you don’t think it’s sexy, or funny, there’s no way I can change your mind. – [Gene Siskel]
There is probably more suffering in a glass of milk
or an ice cream cone than there is in a steak. – [Francione]
Be romantically self destructive with me. – [Kicking and Screaming]
Seems I keep getting the story twisted…so where’s Neil when you need him? – [Tori Amos]
We are immortal in creation. – [D'ni Phrase]
To tell me where the pretty girls are
Those demigods
With their nine-inch nails and little fascist panties tucked inside the heart of every nice girl
- [Tori Amos]
To map the very stuff of life; to look into the genetic mirror and watch a million generations march past. That, friends, is both our curse and our proudest achievement. For it is in reaching to our beginnings that we begin to learn who we truly are. – [Prokhor Zakharov]
I’d rather have paradise in my head than live in this hell. In this life, we’re dead anyway. – [Paradise Now]
I’m not going anywhere. My grandfather didn’t die in World War Two just so that his kin would flee from danger at the first hint of a siren and the first glimpse of one of our fruity policemen’s hats. My grandfather died of cancer in 1955. – [hairysammoth of SA]
Jennifer was nice and everything but she was a virgin which meant she would want to do it at some point and then things would get all serious. – [Paranoid Park]
Corbett was trapped in the wreckage, rammed up against the red-hot iron tomb, screaming like a damned soul. I didn’t even consider trying to get him out. He’d be dead in seconds. His skin would already have been charred away, and he was breathing superheated air and smoke. How could he scream like that with seated lungs? He was a dead man. – [Inferno]
That’s what desire is. The need for what we can’t have. The need for what’s readily available is called greed. – [Lucifer]
Thus, when he came to the harlot, he came to her in rage, and he left her in vain sorrow–feeling himself to have been, once more, most foully robbed, having spent his holy seed in a forbidden darkness where it could only die. – [James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain]
The problem with the world is there are only seven stories. – [Brian Azzarello]
‘He may be a real contender for this position should he
abandon his supposed obediance to white liberal doctrine
of non-violence…and embrace black nationalism’
‘Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to
pinpoint potential trouble-makers…And neutralize them,
neutralize them, neutralize them’ – [RATM]
“…and I just say that every word is true. It’s all true.” – [Bret Easton Ellis]
I live to do what has to be done. – [The Punisher, Garth Ennis]
Memories like that I like to kill, but you can do something with it if you wish. – [The Punisher]
Why bother with newspapers, if this all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits — a false doorway to the backside of life, a filty piss-ridden hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage. – [Hunter S. Thompson]
Fat and thin have to do with fascism as well as fashion, with politics as well as aesthetics. – [Jane Caputi]
I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn’t. I don’t blame him. If I was him then I’d have the same idea about me that he does. – [Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men]
Now I shall do it! I will go alone to the end. – [Christopher Priest, The Prestige]
When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized God doesn’t work that way, so I stole one and prayed for forgiveness. – [Emo Philips]
I gave in easily. What the hell. Mattered not at all. Ellen was grateful, though. She took me twice out of turn. Even that had ceased to matter. And she never came, so why bother? But the machine giggled every time we did it. Loud, up there, back there, all around us, he snickered. It snickered. Most of the time I thought of AM as it, without a soul; but the rest of the time I thought of it as him, in the masculine … the paternal … the patriarchal … for he is a jealous people. Him. It. God as Daddy the Deranged. – [Harlan Ellison, "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"]
Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body. – [Don DeLillo, White Noise]
But Maurine, I can’t come to your party, ’cause I think that I’m dead – [Say Hi]
If a black man hears a noise in the dark, it could be one of three things: police or the dope man. – [Guy I met at a party]
Trees there will be
Apples, fruits maybe
You know what I fear
The end is always near – [The Knife]
I mean sometimes I think we’re all just masturbating each other any way you look at it. If we’re not jerking each other around, we’re jerking each other off. But still, do we have to be so blatant about it? I mean, really. – [Jay McInerney, Story of My Life]
I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a… fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it I can sing it for you. – [HAL, 2001: A Space Odyssey]
Oh look at the trees and look at my face and look at a place far away from here – [Wolf Parade, "I'll Believe in Anything"]
I close my eyes and torch the universe. And it feels good. – [Mr. Mxyzptlk, Superman/Batman: World's Funniest]
What happened with Star Wars was like when McDonald’s got a foothold, the taste for good food just
disappeared. Now we’re in a period of devolution. Everything has gone backward toward a big sucking hole. – [Billy Friedkin, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls]
Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, a whole pack of lies. – [Sage Francis]
That Frank, he lives inside of his own heart. That’s an awful big place to live in. You take good care of that boy. – [Sling Blade]
But I ain’t got not bullets. And I ain’t bullet proof. And you can take your aim, but you can’t kill the truth. – [Saul Williams, "PG"]
Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves. – [Michael Moorcock]
There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact. When you say ‘The Valachi Papers’ is a better film than ‘The Godfather,’ you are wrong. – [Gene Siskel]
Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death. – [Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark]
TV is a marketing vector for stuffed crust pizza and the prescription drugs you have to take so that it doesn’t blow out your heart by age 30. – [Zack Parsons]
But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying. – [Barack Obama]
I need a gun to keep myself from harm. – [Gorillaz]
Don’t quote Dickens in my apartment! – [Orgazmo]
“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.) Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out. – [Arthur C. Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God"]
“Little boys,” she said, “playing with your toys. Think of all the toys I can offer you…think of all the games. I can make you fall in love with me, little boys. Little boys with your little guns.” – [War, Good Omens]
Waiting for a moment to arise
the face in the ceiling
and arms too long
I wait for him to catch me – [Fever Ray, "When I Grow Up"]
Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity. – [Flaubert]
You see? It’s ok. He saw it on the television. – [Jack, The Shining]
Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie’s soft cry and her spirit fled: and even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now. – [Chambers, "The Yellow Sign"]
Love? That’s just a song. We are among the bad apes now. – [Tanya Gold]
She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of that with the wool jersey. – [Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises]
I was enjoying it. It was lousy to enjoy it, but I felt lousy. Cohn has a wonderful quality of bringing out the worst in everybody. – [Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises]
For a reasonable salary I would wash the world
It wouldn’t affect my libido or my self esteem. – [The Knife]
When I suggested to some that porn stars might one day become extinct and the Valley a vanished relic of days gone by, the performers replaced by spinning constellations of flesh-colored computer pixels capable of rearranging themselves into humanly impossible sexual positions with the click of a key, I got blank stares. – [Susannah Breslin, http://theyshootstars.com/]
Forget about an estate. I’m going to build us an empire. – [Richard Gilkey]
O God! it is a long fight, I wish it were over! – [Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights]
I live in calm, looking to the end. – [Helen, Jane Eyre]
In the late 1960s, as the Vietnam War made more and more corpses and less and less sense, distant wars and gallant soldiers were considerably less romantic to Thad than to his young admirer. He praised my eloquence, but gently suggested that I write instead about that things that I knew — the people around me, what he called my own “little postage stamp of soil,” a phrase I would locate decades later in the work of William Faulkner. My next poem was about dear Chuck Rose, the lifeguard at Green Acres swimming pool, who stayed after hours one summer evening to teach a nine-year-old boy to dive and came home in a coffin the following Christmas from a place called Vietnam. – [Tim Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name]
It had given me pause for thought, how easy it was to do what I did. What she’d said, that no one else but me could bear the weight of it, that just made me wonder more. I watched. Remembered. The red wetness cooling as it slid down my ribs. The dead weight settling on my chest. Another used-up, wasted woman, drowning in blood on Afghanistan’s plains. The most I could do for anyone was hold them while they died. Goodbye, I thought. You strange, sad creature. If I could, I’d kill every single one of them. I’d wipe them out. And you’d never have had to exist at all.
- [The Punisher MAX, #49, Garth Ennis]
Forty minutes later he saw her and stopped and sat the horse and watched. She was riding along a red dirt ridge to the south sitting with her hands crossed on the pommel, looking toward the last of the sun, the horse slogging slowly through the loose sandy dirt, the red stain of it following them in the still air. That’s my heart yonder, he told the horse. It always was.
- [Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, p. 302]
These are the women who are amused by the reveries of the stupid novelists, who, knowing little of human nature, work up stale tales, and describe meretricious scenes, all retailed in a sentimental jargon, which equally tend to corrupt the taste, and draw the heart aside from its daily duties. I do not mention the understanding, because never having been exercised, its slumbering energies rest inactive, like the lurking particles of fire which are supposed universally to pervade matter. – [Mary Wollstonecraft]
Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the world as it is now. I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole. – [Philip Roth]
In cyberspace, no one can hear you climax. – [Alan Moore, 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom]
Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky. – [Alan Moore]
I am more scared of us than anyone else. And that’s an oblique place to be. – [David Foster Wallace]
People hate people, not freedom. – [David Foster Wallace]
He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. – [Child of God 156]
Photography became an art by placing its particular techniques in the service of this dual poetics, by making the face of anonymous people speak twice over–as silent witnesses of a condition inscribed directly on their features, their clothes, their life setting; and as possessors of a secret we shall never know, a secret veiled by the very image that delivers them to us. – [Ranciere, The Future of the Image p.15]
Can there be beauty in Sodom? - [Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov p.108)
