Transgressive Fiction

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Lauren Sapala, Between the Shadow and Lo

Better than drugs that don’t last and more solid than gold, vaginas allow women to move about unmolested, in a way that men can only dream of.

Franz Kafka

I am free and that is why I am lost.

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.

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 Self

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

Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.

Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head.

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.

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.

Franz Kafka

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

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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

Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Marquis de Sade

It is only by way of pain one arrives at pleasure

Arthur Koestler

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Joseph Conrad, Chance

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

Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born for love and revolution.

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, 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.

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.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

Sitting on my stool I thought of a bumper sticker: “If Mean People Suck, Why Isn’t My Dick In Your Mouth?

Marquis de Sade

Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.

M Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

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

Marquis de Sade

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

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

Franz Kafka

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

Franz Kafka

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

Give up all hope, all illusion, all desire..I’ve tried. I’ve tried and still I desire, I still desire not to desire and hope to be without hope and have the illusion I can be without illusions..Give up, I say. Give up everything, including the desire to be saved.

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.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

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

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.

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.

Franz Kafka

All language is but a poor translation.

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.

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

Life is rarely about what happened; it’s mostly about what we think happened.

Stephen Graham Jones, After the People Lights Have Gone Off

Each moment, the world washes its hands of you, starts all over again. Easy as that. Wonderful as that.

Franz Kafka

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

Niccolò Machiavelli

Never was anything great achieved without danger.

Arthur Koestler

I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.

Stephen Graham Jones, Mongrels

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

Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

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

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer “Nothing.” The thought went through my mind that it didn’t make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.

Arthur Nersesian, The Fuck-Up

Perhaps the price of comfort is that life passes more rapidly. But for anyone who has lived in uneasiness, even for a short, memorable duration, it’s a trade-off that will gladly be made.

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

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, Dare Me

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

Guy Portman, Charles Middleworth

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

Franz Kafka, The Trial

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

Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

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

Chuck Klosterman

People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

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

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

It takes more than one kick in the pants to reverse a lifetime of unplanned apathy.

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.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

Whenever I’m leaving I get sentimental for that nostalgia I know I won’t have the next day.

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?

David Peace, The Damned Utd

You wake up and for those few seconds, minutes, you forget; forget you are injured; forget you are finished.

Franz Kafka

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

Joan Didion

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

Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.

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.

Paul Auster

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

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.

Franz Kafka

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

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

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.

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

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

David Peace, Nineteen Seventy Four

My father used to say, ‘If you want to know the artist, look at the art’. He was usually talking about Stanley Matthews or Don Bradman when he said it.

Paul Neilan

Nobody knows how to just shut the fuck up and look out the window anymore.

Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

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

David Peace, Nineteen Seventy Four

Uncle Eric holding court, proud the only time he ever left Yorkshire was to kill Germans.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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

Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

It’s the way a man chooses to limit himself that determines his character. A man without habits, consistency, redundancy – and hence boredom – is not human. He’s insane.

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.

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.

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.

Will Self, Grey Area

How much more lonely and driven is the serial monogamist than the serial killer?

Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

Every one interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man’s brain, he either misunderstands you, or doesn’t understand you at all.

Eryk Pruitt, HASHTAG

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

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.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

We live as we dream–alone….

Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.

Graham Greene

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

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

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

Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy

Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.

Jim Carroll, The Petting Zoo

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

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations

Megan Abbott

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

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.

Arthur Koestler

The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

If it hadn’t been what it was, it would’ve been beautiful.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness

Marquis de Sade

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

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.

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.

Jim Thompson

Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

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

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.

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!

George Orwell, 1984

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

Philip K Dick

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

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.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

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

Tama Janowitz, Slaves of New York

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

George Orwell, 1984

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

George Orwell

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

Knut Hamsun, Hunger

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

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

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.

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

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

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

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

Will Self

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

Philip K Dick

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

Philip K Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

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

George Orwell, 1984

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

When you’re a kid, getting lost isn’t just an event or a situation, it’s like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you’ve done something that can never be undone.

Nick Cave

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

Aldous Huxley

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

Ian McEwan, Atonement

She lay in the dark and knew everything.

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

Iain Banks, Against a Dark Background

Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Lauren Sapala, Between the Shadow and Lo

Most people don’t like to admit that vaginas have economic value, but they’re one of our most valuable natural resources.

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.

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.

Albert Camus

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

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.

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

William Golding

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.

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.

George Orwell, 1984

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.

J D Salinger, Franny and Zooey

I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.

Allen Ginsberg

Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.

William Golding

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

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

Iain Banks

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

Allen Ginsberg

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

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.

D H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

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

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Logic is what the devil likes most.

George Orwell

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

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.

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!

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.

Kurt Vonnegut

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

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

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

Iain Banks

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

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.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

George Orwell, 1

Big Brother is Watching You.

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.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.

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.

Albert Camus

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

Knut Hamsun, Hunger

…I will exile my thoughts if they think of you again, and I will rip my lips out if they say your name once more. Now if you do exist, I will tell you my final word in life or in death, I tell you goodbye.

Nick Cave

I’ve always had an obligation to creation, above all.

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

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

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

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.

Jim Carroll

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

William Golding, Pincher Martin

Worse than madness. Sanity.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I am always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.

Kurt Vonnegut

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

James Joyce, Ulysses

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden

Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it’s okay to be a boy; for girls it’s like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.

Ray Bradbury

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Mothers are all slightly insane.

Aldous Huxley

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

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.

Kathy Acker

For the poet, the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other.

James Joyce

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

Kathy Acker

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

Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Ray Bradbury

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

Kelly Braffet, Save Yourself

Hate can be just as intimate as love.

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.

Philip K Dick, VALIS

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

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

And so it goes…

Kathy Acker, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

Anaïs Nin

Ordinary life does not interest me.

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

We were left with nothing because of a love like acid that ate its way through our entire family.

Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

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

Monica Drake, The Folly of Loving Life

I thought I was old, back then. I thought I was grown up. I didn’t know all my big mistakes were up ahead of me, still to come. Always.

J G Ballard

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

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.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

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

Hunter S Thomson

So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

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

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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

I don’t want to die without any scars.

Irvine Welsh

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

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Eroticize intelligence.

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

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

Italo Calvino

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

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.

Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.

Anthony Burgess, Homage To QwertYuiop: Essays

To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

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.

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.

Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.

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.

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.

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

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

Charles Bukowski

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

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.

Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.

Hubert Selby Jr

Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there’s something inside us that’s so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won’t be able to stand looking at it. But it’s when we’re willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.

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.

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

Scott glanced at his watch but didn’t register what it said. The notion of time had become as absurd as the quietly glowing trees.

Douglas Coupland

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

Vladimir Nabokov

Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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

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.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

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.

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

He looked both proud and guilty of something. As if happiness was a reward and he wasn’t sure he’d done enough to deserve it.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Henry Miller

What’s a fuck when what I want is love?

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

Anaïs Nin

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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.

Hunter S Thomson

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

Rupert Thomson, The Insult

There’s love and everybody talks about it, but not all of us come close to it – or, if we do, it’s not in the expected way.

Denis Johnson

English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

The craggy lines that made up the character in his face now seemed like scars of defeat, inflicted on him over time.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

Hubert Selby Jr, Requiem for a Dream

Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done.

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

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

The only value of wasted time is knowledge.

Charles Bukowski, Factotum

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

Henry Miller

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

Sylvia Plath

Is there no way out of the mind?

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.

R D Ronald

The best writers tend to look the roughest in photos. At least that’s the excuse I use for why I look so bad in mine.

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?

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

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

Greg Levin, The Exit Man

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

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.

Hunter S Thomson

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

Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction

No one ever likes the right person.

Irvine Welsh

I’m not running away, I’m moving on.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

R D Ronald

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

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.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Sylvia Plath

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

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.

Hubert Selby Jr, Requiem for a Dream

There’s a sorrow and pain in everyone’s life, but every now and then there’s a ray of light that melts the loneliness in your heart and brings comfort like hot soup and a soft bed.

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.

William S Burroughs

I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.

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.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial – you’d think all women do is clean and bleed.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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.

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

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

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

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.

William S Burroughs

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

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

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.

J G Ballard, Running Wild

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

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.

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she’d done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.

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.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

I have to return some videotapes

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.

Irvine Welsh, Porno

You can’t lie to your soul.

George Orwell, 1984

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

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.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.

George Orwell

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

Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

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

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.

J D Salinger, Franny and Zooey

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

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.

Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

James Joyce

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

William Golding

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.

George Orwell

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

… The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different than the sort you know you’ll get through if you just hang in there

James Joyce, Ulysses

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

Kathy Acker, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I am always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.

Allen Ginsberg

I know too much and not enough

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

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

Aldous Huxley

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

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.

Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

Philip K Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

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

Philip K Dick

The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.

Knut Hamsun, Hunger

Allen Ginsberg

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

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.

Will Self

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

Philip K Dick, VALIS

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

Jim Carroll, Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems

I’ll Die For Your Sins If You Live For mine.

Richard Bachman, Rage

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

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

And so it goes…

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.

Martin Amis

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.

Poppy Z Brite

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Philip K Dick, VALIS

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Jack Kerouac

Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.

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.

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.

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.

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Nick Cave

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

George Orwell

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

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.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

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

Martin Amis, The Second Plane: 14 Responses to September 11

Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.

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.

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.

Dennis Cooper, Frisk

Human bodies are such garbage bags.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Albert Camus

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

Richard Bachman, Rage

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

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.

George Orwell, Animal Farm

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

William Golding

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

Albert Camus

Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?

Kurt Vonnegut

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

Georges Bataille

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

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Iain Banks

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

Georges Bataille, Violent Silence

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

Allen Ginsberg

Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.

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.

Iain Banks

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

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.

Jim Carroll

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Logic is what the devil likes most.

George Orwell, 1

Big Brother is Watching You.

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Mothers are all slightly insane.

George Orwell, 1984

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

Philip K Dick

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

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Martin Amis, London Fields

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

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

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.

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

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

Albert Camus

Live to the point of tears.

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.

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.

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.

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

Ryū Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Ryū Murakami

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

Kelly Braffet, Last Seen Leaving

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

Ian McEwan

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

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

The only value of wasted time is knowledge.

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).

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.

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.

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

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

Greg Levin, The Exit Man

She had become an integral part of my life—just not the part with all the death.

Italo Calvino

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

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.

Sylvia Plath

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

Henry Miller

To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.

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.

Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.

Hunter S Thomson

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

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.

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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.

R D Ronald

The best writers tend to look the roughest in photos. At least that’s the excuse I use for why I look so bad in mine.

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.

J G Ballard, Running Wild

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

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

There is no God and we are his prophets.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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.

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.

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.

Vladimir Nabokov

Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture.

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.

Charles Bukowski, Post Office

I wanted the whole world or nothing.

Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.

Hubert Selby Jr, Requiem for a Dream

But you cant shut everyone out. I mean you have to have someone to love. . .someone to hold on to. . . someone–

R D Ronald

Nothing says Christmas better than familicide and anaphylactic shock.

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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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

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.

Charles Bukowski

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

R D Ronald

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

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

William S Burroughs

There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

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

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

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.

J G Ballard

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.

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.

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

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

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.

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

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

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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.

Craig Clevenger, Dermaphoria

The time flies. The time flies feed on rotting clocks.

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

When life sucks, throw yourself into art.

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.

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

The fig tree had dropped its fruit all over the ground. Ripe figs lay in the dust, exploded, bloody, as if the sky had rained organs.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

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

Henry Miller

What’s a fuck when what I want is love?

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.

Hunter S Thomson

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

Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

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

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

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

Henry Miller

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

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

J G Ballard

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.

Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

Disappear here

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

Scott glanced at his watch but didn’t register what it said. The notion of time had become as absurd as the quietly glowing trees.

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, The Rules of Attraction

No one ever likes the right person.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

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

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.

Rupert Thomson, The Insult

There’s love and everybody talks about it, but not all of us come close to it – or, if we do, it’s not in the expected way.

Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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.

Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

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

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

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

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.

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.

Charles Bukowski, Barfly

I don’t hate them…I just feel better when they’re not around.

J G Ballard, Crash

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

Anaïs Nin

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Irvine Welsh, Porno

You can’t lie to your soul.

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.

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.

Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

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

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.

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.

Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

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

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone’s comfort

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