Transgressive Fiction

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Paul Neilan

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

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.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

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

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

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

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.

Graham Greene

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

Megan Abbott

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

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.

Joan Didion

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

Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

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

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

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

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.

Marquis de Sade

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

Jim Carroll

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

Blake Butler, There Is No Year

Email servers learned to laugh.

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

Franz Kafka

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

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.

Guy Portman, Charles Middleworth

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

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

Hate is a lack of imagination.

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.

Marquis de Sade

Fuck! Is one expected to be a gentleman when one is stiff?

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

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.

Franz Kafka

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Chuck Klosterman

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

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

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

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.

Arthur Nersesian, Dogrun

I lay in bed and watched moments break into phenomenal particles of panic and could actually see the divine crack of God’s ass as he completely turned his back on me.

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.

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, The Trial

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

Jim Thompson

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

Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.

Franz Kafka

All language is but a poor translation.

Arthur Koestler

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

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

Franz Kafka

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

Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn’t know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn’t have loved her more.

Guy Portman, Charles Middleworth

… her skills more akin to the baking of macaroons than solving the complexities of the universe.

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.

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.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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

Arthur Nersesian, The Fuck-Up

As the components of your life are stripped away, after all the ambitions and hopes vaporize, you reach a self-reflective starkness– the repetitious plucking of a single overwound string.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

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

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.

Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

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

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.

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.

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.

Eryk Pruitt, HASHTAG

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

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

I thought at the time that I couldn’t be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that’s a common conceit, that you’ve already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

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.

Blake Butler

black beyond black

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

Aleister Crowley, Magick: Liber ABA: Book 4

The sin which is unpardonable is knowingly and wilfully to reject truth, to fear knowledge lest that knowledge pander not to thy prejudices.

Franz Kafka

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

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

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

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.

Franz Kafka

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

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

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

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.

A C Weisbecker

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

Franz Kafka

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

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.

Guy Portman, Charles Middleworth

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

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.

Will Self, Grey Area

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

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.

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, 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!

Will Christopher Baer

Sorrow is like the ocean and sometimes I wish my heart would stop.

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.

Joseph Conrad, Chance

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

Arthur Nersesian, Mesopotamia

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

Marquis de Sade

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

Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy

Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.

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.

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

David Peace, Nineteen Seventy Four

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

Niccolò Machiavelli

Never was anything great achieved without danger.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

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

Jim Carroll, The Petting Zoo

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

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.

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

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.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

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

Paul Auster

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

Eryk Pruitt, HASHTAG

She was like a redneck Yoko Ono.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Niccolò Machiavelli

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

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.

Joan Didion, Where I Was From

I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

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

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

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

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.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Knut Hamsun, Hunger

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

Kelly Braffet, Last Seen Leaving

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

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.

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

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

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.

Philip K Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

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

D H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

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

James Joyce, Ulysses

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

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.

Richard Bachman, Rage

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

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.

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Kathy Acker

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

Ryū Murakami

Everybody wants to talk about themselves, and everybody wants to hear everybody else’s story, so we take turns playing reporter and celebrity.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

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

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

Philip K Dick

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

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.

Philip K Dick

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

Kurt Vonnegut

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

Tama Janowitz, Slaves of New York

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

Nick Cave

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

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

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

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

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’.

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.

Georges Bataille

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

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

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

Albert Camus

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

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!

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.

Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

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.

Georges Bataille

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

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

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

Kelly Braffet, Save Yourself

Hate can be just as intimate as love.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

Aldous Huxley

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

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

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

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

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

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

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

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.

William Golding

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

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

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

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

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, 1984

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

Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

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

James Joyce, Ulysses

And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

Georges Bataille

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

James Joyce, Ulysses

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

Will Self

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

James Joyce, Ulysses

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

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.

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.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.

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.

Iain Banks

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

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.

Nick Cave

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

Allen Ginsberg

I know too much and not enough

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

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

Ray Bradbury

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

Iain Banks

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

Knut Hamsun

Love is every bit as violent and dangerous as murder.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

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

Jim Carroll

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

George Orwell, 1984

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

William Golding

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

Albert Camus

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

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Mothers are all slightly insane.

George Orwell, 1984

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

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.

James Joyce

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

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.

Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly

I have seen myself backward.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?

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.

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.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

Greg Levin, The Exit Man

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

Hunter S Thomson

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

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

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

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

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

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.

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.

J G Ballard, Crash

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

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.

Rupert Thomson, Dreams of Leaving

Her smiles were blurred, as if seen from a moving train. Her eyes always creased at the edges by dreams of leaving.

J G Ballard

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

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

There is no God and we are his prophets.

Vladimir Nabokov

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

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

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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

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.

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.

Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

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

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, 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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

I don’t want to die without any scars.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

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.

Sylvia Plath

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

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.

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?

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.

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

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

Charles Bukowski, Barfly

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

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.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

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

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.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

We are most artistically caged.

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.

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.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

J G Ballard, Running Wild

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

Denis Johnson

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

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

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

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I have found God, but he is insufficient.

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.

Henry Miller

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

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.

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.

Charles Bukowski, Factotum

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

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

Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

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

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

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

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

Anaïs Nin

Ordinary life does not interest me.

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.

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.

Henry Miller

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

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

Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

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

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

The only value of wasted time is knowledge.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

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

William S Burroughs

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Anaïs Nin

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

R D Ronald

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

I have to return some videotapes

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.

Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

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

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.

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.

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.

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

I’d rather wear bare skin than raw silk any day.

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

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

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.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

Henry Miller

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

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.

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.

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Irvine Welsh, Porno

You can’t lie to your soul.

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.

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.

R D Ronald

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

Anthony Burgess, Homage To QwertYuiop: Essays

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

Denis Johnson, Already Dead

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

Charles Bukowski, Post Office

I wanted the whole world or nothing.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

Bret Easton Ellis

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

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

William S Burroughs

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

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.

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden

Nick Cave

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

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.

Philip K Dick, VALIS

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

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.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?

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.

D H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

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

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

Albert Camus

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

Kurt Vonnegut

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

James Joyce, Ulysses

And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

Iain Banks, Use of Weapons

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

Albert Camus

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

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.

Albert Camus

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

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

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.

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.

Ryū Murakami

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

Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

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.

James Joyce, Ulysses

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

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

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

Kathy Acker

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

Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly

I have seen myself backward.

Poppy Z Brite

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

William Golding, Pincher Martin

Worse than madness. Sanity.

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.

Philip K Dick

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

George Orwell, 1984

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Will Self

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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

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.

Aldous Huxley

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Logic is what the devil likes most.

Matthew Stokoe, High Life

Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

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

Kathy Acker

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

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.

Poppy Z Brite

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

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

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

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.

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.

George Orwell, Animal Farm

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

Ian McEwan

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

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.

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.

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.

George Orwell, 1984

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

Ryū Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

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

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

Albert Camus

Live to the point of tears.

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.

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

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

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.

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.

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.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

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

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

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

Richard Bachman, Rage

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

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?

George Orwell

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

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

Shut your eyes and see.

James Joyce

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

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

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

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.

Philip K Dick, Martian Time-Slip

I’m not much but I’m all I have.

Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

William Golding

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

Alissa Nutting, Tampa

Philip K Dick

Allen Ginsberg

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

Matthew Stokoe, High Life

I slept and the night rolled over into day like a dog. Another post-meridian awakening – sunshine on empty bottles, tangled clothes. I dozed while the temperature rose.

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.

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.

Martin Amis, The Information

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

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Martin Amis, Other People

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

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.

Jim Carroll

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

James Joyce, Ulysses

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

Jim Carroll, Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems

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

George Orwell, 1

Big Brother is Watching You.

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

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

Philip K Dick

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

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.

Henry Miller

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

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.

Anaïs Nin

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

Irvine Welsh, Porno

You can’t lie to your soul.

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.

Hunter S Thomson

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

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

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.

J G Ballard

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

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

J G Ballard

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

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

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

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

R D Ronald

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

William S Burroughs

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

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.

Charles Bukowski, Factotum

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

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

Irvine Welsh

I’m not running away, I’m moving on.

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

I knew every raindrop by its name.

Edit | Delete J G Ballard, The Day of Creation

Sooner or later, everything turns into television.

Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

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.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

Denis Johnson

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

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

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

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.

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

I’d rather wear bare skin than raw silk any day.

Hunter S Thomson

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

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

I have to return some videotapes

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.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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.

William S Burroughs

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

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

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

Sometimes truths are what we run from, and sometimes they are what we seek.

Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.

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.

R D Ronald

Nothing says Christmas better than familicide and anaphylactic shock.

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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

Anthony Burgess, Homage To QwertYuiop: Essays

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

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

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).

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.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

We are most artistically caged.

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?

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

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.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

Ken Kesey, Kesey’s Garage Sale

Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

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

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

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.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

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.

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

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

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

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

Anaïs Nin

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

J G Ballard, Crash

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

William S Burroughs

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

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I have found God, but he is insufficient.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

R D Ronald

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

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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

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.

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.

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

Vladimir Nabokov

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

Rupert Thomson, Dreams of Leaving

Her smiles were blurred, as if seen from a moving train. Her eyes always creased at the edges by dreams of leaving.

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.

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.

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.

Douglas Coupland, Life After God

And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

There is no God and we are his prophets.

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