Transgressive Fiction

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Guy Portman, Charles Middleworth

She only wears black now and she’s umm; well she’s threatening to become a vampire.

Tanya Thompson, Assuming Names: A Con Artist’s Masquerade

Do you know the difference between neurotics and psychotics? Neurotics build castles in the sky; psychotics move into them.

Franz Kafka

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries

they’re fucking up minds they do not own.

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

Ages fourteen to eighteen, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something — anything — to begin.

Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue, so that I triumph even when I fall!

M Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

Finally, when all was said and done, the certainty (so often experienced, yet always new) that female charms, the kind that inflame the senses, are no more than kitchen smells: they tease you when you’re hungry and disgust you when you’ve had your fill.

Paul Auster, Oracle Night

It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don’t know half as much as I think I do.

Tanya Thompson, Assuming Names: A Con Artist’s Masquerade

From what I’d witnessed, honesty didn’t really make anyone happy. The truth was a punch to the gut, and while you were falling, a knee to the face, then you could lie on the floor and bleed for a spell.

Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.

Franz Kafka

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

I put the girl’s teeth shaped like my mother’s teeth into my own mouth and on her teeth I chewed until I heard my own teeth in my head breaking and I swallowed and I smiled.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.

Lionel Shriver, Checker and the Derailleurs

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can’t have that they don’t think for a second about whether they really want it.

Will Self

Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.

Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

Blood helicopters chopped across my slim cerebrum like fresh diamonds, rings in screaming on small hands coming awake inside my linings, each after its own way to reach beyond me.

Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.

Niccolò Machiavelli

Never was anything great achieved without danger.

Marquis de Sade

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

If stealing a few saltshakers was wrong I didn’t want to be right.

Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.

Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one’s energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

Arthur Nersesian, Dogrun

Nowadays the standards had plummeted so far that I failed even at being a failure. I silently packed up. Nothing else was left. They had even robbed me of self-pity

Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy

Kugel was a firm believer that death was not always a bad thing – that life often reached such levels of crapitude that dying was preferable to living.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

The world is your oyster… …too bad you’re allergic to shellfish.

Blake Butler, Scorch Atlas

Overhead the sky was melting, the cracked cream color rubbing off in cogs of brine. The fields far ahead of me in endless pudding, studded here and there with what had been: homes and houses, hair and heirlooms, habits, hallways, hauntings, hope.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.

Guy Portman, Charles Middleworth

Well if being related by internet marriage is family, I suppose we are.

Joseph Conrad, Chance

Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.

Luke Rhinehart

There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we normally live our lives and we’d sort of like to find out what it is.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

We live as we dream–alone….

Franz Kafka

There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe … but not for us.

Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

I’m a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.

Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

And my life went to pieces, like a love letter in the rain.

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer and other stories

Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank — but that’s not the same thing.

Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy

…the greatest source of misery in the world, the greatest cause of anguish and hatred and sadness and death, was neither disease nor race nor religion. It was hope.

M Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

To begin with, I had never done any good deeds; besides, even if I had simply fabricated a few, I would not have enjoyed going on about them.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

What did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings?

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

Franz Kafka

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

Franz Kafka, The Trial

It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

It’s far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.

Franz Kafka

All language is but a poor translation.

Franz Kafka

I am in chains. Don’t touch my chains.

Arthur Nersesian, Manhattan Loverboy

The masses-I love em-they rush for red lights, risking everything to capture a few seconds, only to get home and waste their lives.

Stephen Graham Jones, Mongrels

If you’re not a beautiful monster, then you’re a villager

Jim Carroll, The Petting Zoo

Back then, Billy imagined that drops of rain were unanswered prayers falling back to earth.

Eryk Pruitt, HASHTAG

She was like a redneck Yoko Ono.

Marquis de Sade

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!

Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

Megan Abbott, The Fever

I have another friend who gets what I’m really like, and I get her. She scares me. Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?

Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.

David Peace, Nineteen Seventy Four

I was miles and years away and then suddenly aware my hour was at hand, feeling all their eyes on me.

Stephen Graham Jones, After the People Lights Have Gone Off

But at some point you have to just decide that if a bear’s going to eat you, a bear’s going to eat you, and then you go about your day.

Jim Thompson

There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

We’re all wanting things we don’t understand. things we can’t even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions over our hearts.

M Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

And if all womankind banded together and took the male path, the world would turn into one huge brothel.

Thomas Pluck, Dark City Lights

I worked all day in back of a hot van snipping off dog balls, I can cut one more pair.

Megan Abbott

When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control it all.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

It’s like someone who prays every night saying God’s a good listener. Just because you’re talking to us doesn’t mean we’re listening. With me and God, you never really know.

A C Weisbecker

If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.

Joan Didion

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

I am so stupid, so easily fooled. It’s really almost funny. If I could lift a finger I would gladly kill myself.

Stephen Graham Jones, The Least of My Scars

Don’t let anybody ever tell you life’s fair. Not as long as I’m in it.

Arthur Koestler, Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-1967

Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

A weed is a plant out of place.

Joan Didion

You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.

Franz Kafka

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Franz Kafka

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

M Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake in the middle of the night and begin to realize, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not only their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life.

Will Christopher Baer, Penny Dreadful

A friend is like anything else. A dog, a plant. You ignore them and they tend to die on you.

Eryk Pruitt, HASHTAG

Do you understand why I prefer you to have a toy gun?

Megan Abbott, You Will Know Me

Because there’s a hundred ways sex can ruin you but there’s no end to the ways love can.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.

Arthur Nersesian, Mesopotamia

Stressful jobs, loveless marriages, bad food-most people kill themselves slowly every day.

Aleister Crowley, Magick: Liber ABA: Book 4

One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously; but to take it seriously one must be already mad.

Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn’t just naive it’s a vanity.

Lauren Sapala, Between the Shadow and Lo

I told most people I was an alcoholic if they asked and some if they didn’t. I figured everyone deserved a fair chance to cut and run at the very beginning.

Graham Greene

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.

Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

We got married: society’s solution to loneliness, lust and laundry.

Niccolò Machiavelli

I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.

Marquis de Sade

Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.

Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

Disappear, she says. I love that word.

Paul Auster

You can’t put your feet on the ground until you’ve touched the sky.

Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands

It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes

Franz Kafka

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

Love is a kind of killing, Addy,” she says. “Don’t you know that?

Jim Carroll

You see, you just don’t know I’m here to give you my heart And you want some fashion show

Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

Tell me the manner in which a patient commits suicide and I’ll tell you how he can be cured

Poppy Z Brite, Wormwood: A Collection of Short Stories

You hold onto what you have; you do not give it up easily, even when you know it is poisoning you.

J D Salinger, Franny and Zooey

I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.

James Joyce

Shut your eyes and see.

Georges Bataille

In what will survive me I am in harmony with my annihilation.

Kathy Acker

If you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you. I want everything.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Martin Amis, The Information

He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.

Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

And so it goes…

Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

Alissa Nutting, Tampa

His eyes took in the details of my body with a conflicted gaze that I knew well: even having seen all the facts of the case, he still wanted me. He wanted me despite knowing what that meant about him.

Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

James Joyce

All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.

Allen Ginsberg

I know too much and not enough

Jack Kerouac

I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

Kurt Vonnegut

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

Poppy Z Brite

When you have too much faith in something, it’s bound to hurt you. Too much faith in anything will suck you dry. In this way, all the world is a vampire.

Matthew Stokoe, High Life

I’d done it, I’d crossed the line between accepted behavior and behavior most of the population would consider a lynching offense, and that morning I felt as real as any of the men in the Escape commercials. It had been dirty and nasty but I wanted more.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.

Nick Cave

People think I’m a miserable sod but it’s only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions.

Iain Banks

It’s a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those

Kelly Braffet, Last Seen Leaving

All he would say was that sometimes you have to burn it down and start over.

Will Self

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

Knut Hamsun

Love is every bit as violent and dangerous as murder.

Nick Cave

Inspiration is a word used by people who aren’t really doing anything.

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you’re someone else.

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions.

George Orwell, 1984

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

How nice — to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Mothers are all slightly insane.

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

When a child grows old enough to know J.R.R. Tolkien was just staring at a typewriter, the truth can be a wounding exposé.

Alissa Nutting, Tampa

There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

Ian McEwan, Saturday

You can tell a lot from a person’s nails. When a life starts to unravel, they’re among the first to go.

George Orwell, 1

Big Brother is Watching You.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.

Philip K Dick, VALIS

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

Georges Bataille

I don’t want your love unless you know i am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.

Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

Parents, teachers, government – they all teach you how to live the dreary , deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.

Martin Amis, Other People

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Philip K Dick, Martian Time-Slip

I’m not much but I’m all I have.

James Joyce

Your battles inspired me – not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.

Ryū Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

They don’t realise that they’ve changed; they think it’s the world that changed.

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

William Golding, Pincher Martin

Worse than madness. Sanity.

Richard Bachman, Rage

That was Dad’s life, and I was the birdshit on his windshield.

Knut Hamsun, Hunger

Truth is neither objectivity nor the balanced view; truth is a selfless subjectivity.

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

George Orwell, 1984

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without impact. Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

Albert Camus

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

George Orwell, 1984

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

Richard Bachman, Roadwork

All places are the same unless your mind changes. There’s no magic place to get your mind right. If you feel like shit, everything you see looks like shit.

Ryū Murakami

She’s like smoke:you think you’re seeing her clearly enough, but when you reach for her there’s nothing there

George Orwell

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

Aldous Huxley

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

Philip K Dick

If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.

George Orwell

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Poppy Z Brite

Why bother? I was right all along: the second you make yourself vulnerable to someone, they start drawing blood.

Dennis Cooper, Closer

I’m a talentless but popular young singer and I have the feeling someone is watching me. I use the term loosely because I have few feelings, and even they’re too simple, like primary colors.

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn’t really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.

Ray Bradbury

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

Kurt Vonnegut

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

George Orwell

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Ray Bradbury

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.

Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel

Listen, ah don’t wanna speak ill of the dead but have ah told you that mah mother was a great whopping whale of a cunt? Well she was precisely that – a great whopping whale of a hog’s cunt with a dirty maggot for a brain.

Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Philip K Dick, VALIS

There exists, for everyone, a sentence – a series of words – that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you’re lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.

Allen Ginsberg

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly

I have seen myself backward.

Georges Bataille

The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.

Albert Camus

Live to the point of tears.

Nick Cave, The Death of Bunny Munro

I am damned,’ thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.

Albert Camus

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Richard Bachman, Thinner

The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn’t believe what he’s seeing.

Iain Banks, Use of Weapons

I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.

Poppy Z Brite, Lost Souls

If you want something, you don’t wait for the world to deal it out for you. You take it.

Richard Bachman, Rage

Lunacy is when you can’t see the seams where they stitched the world together anymore.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar’s vile tongue be cut out! Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!

George Orwell

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

William Golding

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

Will Self

I’m going to end up like one of those old weirdos who lives in a network of tunnels burrowed through trash – yet I do not fear this.

Albert Camus

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

George Orwell, 1984

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

None of us really has anything to lose. That makes it easier to give away.

Allen Ginsberg

I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I’ll never be sane.

Jim Carroll

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

Dennis Cooper, Frisk

Human bodies are such garbage bags.

Christa Faust

I hate malls. They’re like strip clubs for women. All tease and sparkle and the empty promise that if you just drop enough cash, somehow you’ll be fulfilled.

Iain Banks, Against a Dark Background

Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.

Tama Janowitz, Slaves of New York

I had a hunger for things I knew realistically I didn’t actually care for.

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

Why is it I feel a new nostalgia for the era of the guillotine?

Kelly Braffet, Save Yourself

Hate can be just as intimate as love.

George Orwell, 1984

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

D H Lawrence, The Complete Poems

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

That’s why Twinkle likes the place so much, Scott thought, looking around at the faded wood veneer tables, and the faded souls drinking at them. Misery was soaked through the place like the old beer soaked through its carpets.

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

Over the previous six months, there was only one thing Gage had become more efficient at than killing… and that was dying.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

That’s what birthdays were. Days when you found out where you stood. Who was on your side and who wasn’t. Nothing to do with how old you were.

Hunter S Thomson, Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

Jack laughed behind him, a mirthless sound from a man who had been on the wrong end of life’s ironies too many times.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

I don’t want to die without any scars.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

There’s a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.

R D Ronald

Anyone who says “Trust me” is the last motherfucker you should ever trust.

Henry Miller

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music – the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

Charles Bukowski, Factotum

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

Charles Bukowski

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

J G Ballard

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.

Vladimir Nabokov

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

A lot of people lacked that gift: knowing when to fuck off.

Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

You have to die a few times before you can really live.

Greg Levin, The Exit Man

Suicide should come with a warning label: ‘Do not try this alone.’

William S Burroughs

Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

He never praised me whenever I’d hit a home run in little league, but I kill a few people and all of the sudden I’m his idol.

Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus

In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other’s sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week.

Charles Bukowski

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

Charles Bukowski

Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

Matthew Stokoe, Cows

He was adrift in their world, unsure of his significance, and to open himself to a point where conversation could take place would only have revealed how unlike them he was.

Bret Easton Ellis

Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

I asked the cardiologist why an electrocardiogram was called an EKG, instead of an ECG. He said, “Nazis. Nazis invented the machine.” After he left, I found a napkin on my breakfast tray and wrote that down: EKG = Nazis.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

R D Ronald

This faulty light fitting at the front door with the dangerously flickering bulb looks rather festive. Who says I don’t do Christmas?

R D Ronald, The Zombie Room

Decker smiled and shrugged off their laughter. The humour was only barbed if you sat on the outside, and now he was one of them.

R D Ronald

I’m the biggest critic of my own work, but sometimes you nail a chapter so good that you have to take a step back and admire that bitch.

Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am.

Sylvia Plath

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

But what I do I do because I like to do.

Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realize that? It’s the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.

Irvine Welsh

I’m not running away, I’m moving on.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

When life sucks, throw yourself into art.

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

That’s one of the drawbacks of good narcotics—they often cause you to say cheerful things.

Vladimir Nabokov

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.

Douglas Coupland

I don’t think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.

Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction

What does that mean know me, know me, nobody ever knows anybody else, ever! You will never know me.

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

We’d be dead. Big deal. Death’s not such a long drop these days. Not for us.

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

The only value of wasted time is knowledge.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

William S Burroughs

Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.

Denis Johnson, Already Dead

I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me…I’m the one happening.

enis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place

Irvine Welsh

Some people are easier to love when you don’t have to be around them.

Kola Boof, The Sexy Part of the Bible

But somehow, once you start playing behind the steering wheel of God, you realize just how powerful it is to be the imagination driving the natural world (64).

Charles Bukowski

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

It’s taken me years of practice to learn how to act natural.

William S Burroughs

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on. A psychotic is a guy who’s just found out what’s going on.

R D Ronald

I’m not into this whole “move with the times” thing. I reckon we should just decide on a year and stick with it.

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

…what they show tells you what they want to hide.

R D Ronald

I don’t “lol”. I tried it once but it just didn’t agree with me.

Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.

Vladimir Nabokov

Our imagination flies — we are its shadow on the earth.

J G Ballard

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

Disappear here

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

They can’t tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Hubert Selby Jr, Requiem for a Dream

He didn’t know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time comprehend.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

Matthew Stokoe, Cows

The Guernsey’s eyes were deep and brown and Steven knew that the curl of its lips was a small cow smile.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I have found God, but he is insufficient.

R D Ronald

Today I plan to smile a lot, only so people who know me will be freaked the fuck out.

Anaïs Nin

I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ

Rupert Thomson, Secrecy

Perhaps there comes a time in your life when you lose the ability to command attention, when the world starts to ignore you because it no longer believes you can have much of an effect on it.

J G Ballard, Crash

I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.

Hunter S Thomson

Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.

Henry Miller

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Not a visible enthusiasm but a hidden one, an excitement burning with a cold flame.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

In this job, you learn to ignore the urge to comfort those you’re protecting.

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

We’re waiting for a glance or a word, some acknowledgement that we are here.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.

Greg Levin, The Exit Man

One week I’m helping to end a life, the next I’m stepping in to save one. Seemingly dichotomous acts, but actually one in the same.

J G Ballard

Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.

William S Burroughs, Naked Lunch

You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

Irvine Welsh, Porno

You can’t lie to your soul.

Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

I was not a lovable child, and I’d grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it’d be a scribble with fangs.

Ken Kesey, Kesey’s Garage Sale

It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you’re someone else.

Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

Parents, teachers, government – they all teach you how to live the dreary , deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.

George Orwell

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

D H Lawrence

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

None of us really has anything to lose. That makes it easier to give away.

Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Logic is what the devil likes most.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

Philip K Dick

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

Georges Bataille

I don’t want your love unless you know i am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.

Nick Cave

Inspiration is a word used by people who aren’t really doing anything.

Alissa Nutting, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

I was like a turd inside someone who’d accidentally swallowed an engagement ring: I was nothing, yet I carried something uniquely special.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

How nice — to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

Why is it I feel a new nostalgia for the era of the guillotine?

Philip K Dick

If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.

Albert Camus

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Dennis Cooper, Closer

Dan thought of love as defined by books, cobwebbed and hidden from view by the past. Too bad a love like that didn’t actually exist. In the twentieth century one had to fake it.

Kelly Braffet, Save Yourself

Hate can be just as intimate as love.

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

When a child grows old enough to know J.R.R. Tolkien was just staring at a typewriter, the truth can be a wounding exposé.

Martin Amis, London Fields

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

George Orwell

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.

Knut Hamsun, Hunger

Truth is neither objectivity nor the balanced view; truth is a selfless subjectivity.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Mothers are all slightly insane.

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

The longer you went without speaking, the harder it gets to break the silence.

Martin Amis, House of Meetings

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.

George Orwell, 1984

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Kathy Acker

If you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you. I want everything.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.

Nick Cave, The Death of Bunny Munro

I am damned,’ thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.

Aldous Huxley

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.

George Orwell, 1984

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Alissa Nutting, Tampa

D H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.

Philip K Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

And so it goes…

Ryū Murakami

She’s like smoke:you think you’re seeing her clearly enough, but when you reach for her there’s nothing there

Albert Camus

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

George Orwell, Animal Farm

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn’t really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.

Ian McEwan

No one knows anything, really. It’s all rented, or borrowed.

Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

Poppy Z Brite, Lost Souls

If you want something, you don’t wait for the world to deal it out for you. You take it.

Poppy Z Brite

When you have too much faith in something, it’s bound to hurt you. Too much faith in anything will suck you dry. In this way, all the world is a vampire.

Aldous Huxley

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

Ian McEwan

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality

George Orwell, 1984

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Richard Bachman, Thinner

The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn’t believe what he’s seeing.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

George Orwell, Animal Farm

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Poppy Z Brite

The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.

George Orwell, 1984

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

Kurt Vonnegut

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.

Georges Bataille

The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.

George Orwell, 1984

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Ryū Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

They don’t realise that they’ve changed; they think it’s the world that changed.

Albert Camus

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

James Joyce

All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.

George Orwell, 1984

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

J D Salinger, Franny and Zooey

I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions.

Philip K Dick, VALIS

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

George Orwell, 1984

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Iain Banks

Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot

D H Lawrence, The Complete Poems

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It’s an universal law– intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Allen Ginsberg

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

Albert Camus

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Iain Banks, Against a Dark Background

Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.

Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

Crowd was to be pleased. Crowd was to be worshipped and feared. Ultimately, Crowd was to be made sacrifice unto.

Albert Camus

Live to the point of tears.

Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel

And Satan sighed and shook his head, played harp amongst the flames. ‘It’s Hell up there in Heaven too, for all that that is worth. Heaven is just a lie of mine to make it Hell on Earth.

Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly

I have seen myself backward.

Poppy Z Brite, Wormwood: A Collection of Short Stories

You hold onto what you have; you do not give it up easily, even when you know it is poisoning you.

Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.

James Joyce, Ulysses

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Ian McEwan, Saturday

You can tell a lot from a person’s nails. When a life starts to unravel, they’re among the first to go.

Ian McEwan, Atonement

She lay in the dark and knew everything.

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

Kurt Vonnegut

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

Iain Banks, Use of Weapons

I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.

James Joyce

Shut your eyes and see.

Ian McEwan, Atonement

It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.

Aldous Huxley

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

Philip K Dick

There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me’.

Kurt Vonnegut

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

Dennis Cooper, Frisk

Human bodies are such garbage bags.

George Orwell, 1984

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.

Will Self

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Tama Janowitz, Slaves of New York

I don’t like him…he makes me feel like he’s going to throw me in a coffin and walk around on top of it.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

George Orwell, 1984

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

Looking at me, you’d never guess I’d killed three people. It isn’t fair.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

I have to return some videotapes

Denis Johnson, Already Dead

I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me…I’m the one happening.

Irvine Welsh, Porno

You can’t lie to your soul.

Anaïs Nin

Ordinary life does not interest me.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

All it comes down to is this: I feel like shit but look great.

R D Ronald

Nothing says Christmas better than familicide and anaphylactic shock.

Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus

R D Ronald, The Zombie Room

Decker smiled and shrugged off their laughter. The humour was only barbed if you sat on the outside, and now he was one of them.

Rupert Thomson, The Insult

You have to do normal things or they don’t go away. You have to reassure them. Or they just stand there staring at you, as if you’re a car-crash, or pornography.

Bret Easton Ellis

Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

Vladimir Nabokov

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

Italo Calvino

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

J G Ballard, Crash

After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

There is no God and we are his prophets.

Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

Craig Clevenger, Dermaphoria

Everything in the universe is everything else. A man is a killer is a saint is a monkey is a cockroach is a goldfish is a whale, and the Devil is just the angel who asked for More.

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

Over the previous six months, there was only one thing Gage had become more efficient at than killing… and that was dying.

Hunter S Thomson

Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.

Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am.

R D Ronald

I don’t “lol”. I tried it once but it just didn’t agree with me.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.

Henry Miller

Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.

Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

I don’t deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

I say I’m fine. I tell him I’ll be back to my old self once we’re getting handcuffed in Phnom Penh.

Charles Bukowski

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

That’s one of the drawbacks of good narcotics—they often cause you to say cheerful things.

Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

She looked the way a rose petal looks when you crush it between finger and thumb.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

Edit | Delete J G Ballard, The Day of Creation

Sooner or later, everything turns into television.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

There’s nothing better than being the bad guy. Long enough to do some good.

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

We’d be dead. Big deal. Death’s not such a long drop these days. Not for us.

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

A person’s life story is equal to what they have plus what they want most in the world, minus what they’re actually willing to sacrifice for it.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

I can’t remember if I took an oxy during the flight, so I eat two. They pair nicely with the scotch. It’s good to be home.

R D Ronald

Anyone who says “Trust me” is the last motherfucker you should ever trust.

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

I felt so heavy with love. I could feel it packed inside my chest.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

There’s a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

A lot of people lacked that gift: knowing when to fuck off.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

Irvine Welsh

Some people are easier to love when you don’t have to be around them.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

Hunter S Thomson

Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.

William S Burroughs, Naked Lunch

You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Charles Bukowski

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

It’s taken me years of practice to learn how to act natural.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Eroticize intelligence.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

William S Burroughs

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

I don’t want to die without any scars.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I have found God, but he is insufficient.

Irvine Welsh

I’m not running away, I’m moving on.

Hunter S Thomson

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Not a visible enthusiasm but a hidden one, an excitement burning with a cold flame.

Anaïs Nin

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

Vladimir Nabokov

Our imagination flies — we are its shadow on the earth.

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

He never praised me whenever I’d hit a home run in little league, but I kill a few people and all of the sudden I’m his idol.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

Sylvia Plath

Is there no way out of the mind?

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.

Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction

What does that mean know me, know me, nobody ever knows anybody else, ever! You will never know me.

Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Hunter S Thomson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman

A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

Jack laughed behind him, a mirthless sound from a man who had been on the wrong end of life’s ironies too many times.

Hubert Selby Jr, Requiem for a Dream

I suspect there will never be a requiem for a dream, simply because it will destroy us before we have the opportunity to mourn it’s passing.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.

Rupert Thomson, Secrecy

Perhaps there comes a time in your life when you lose the ability to command attention, when the world starts to ignore you because it no longer believes you can have much of an effect on it.

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

The world is on fire; time is a bomb. Ten thousand years are not enough When so much remains to be done

enis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.

Henry Miller

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

The Buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that’s not the one. When you meet your ‘soul mate’ you’ll feel calm. No anxiety, no agitation.

J G Ballard

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

Douglas Coupland

I don’t think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

I knew every raindrop by its name.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.

Anaïs Nin

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Kola Boof, The Sexy Part of the Bible

But somehow, once you start playing behind the steering wheel of God, you realize just how powerful it is to be the imagination driving the natural world (64).

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

William S Burroughs

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on. A psychotic is a guy who’s just found out what’s going on.

J G Ballard, Running Wild

In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

Sometimes what I wouldn’t give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.

R D Ronald

Today I plan to smile a lot, only so people who know me will be freaked the fuck out.

Violet Levoit, I Miss The World

Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “9/11.” “I shouldn’t even.” “No, come on.” “9/11 who?” “You swore you’d never forget.

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