Transgressive Fiction

Welcome to the site, and now you’re here go take a look around. Be sure you follow your favorite authors via their social media buttons, and why not check out a few new ones as well. Add a bunch of books to your Goodreads to-read list, and there are buy buttons for those you want to order after checking out the Kindle previews on each book page. Check out the One Star feature for some of the most “Insightful” readers out there giving their bewilderingly clueless approximation of these classics. Use the Contact Us section to send suggestions of books you’d love to see on the site, authors you’d love us to interview, pics of you with your TF collection to stick in the Gallery, and whatever the hell else you feel like sharing.

A final word from your (possibly unreliable) Narrator before you go……

The first rule of TransgressiveFiction.info is you MUST talk about TransgressiveFiction.info

The second rule of TransgressiveFiction.info is you MUST talk about TransgressiveFiction.info

The third rule of TransgressiveFiction.info is, if your friends don’t want to hear about TransgressiveFiction.info, go get some new friends.

#TransgressiveFiction #TFDI

Sportaza Kasyno i zakłady

Gdy tylko otworzysz sekcję zakładów sportowych, staniesz przed długą listą różnorodnych dyscyplin od Sportaza PL. Szczególnie w piłce nożnej istnieje niesamowita ilość opcji zakładów. Możliwe są również zakłady na żywo. W tym obszarze znajdujemy również przejrzystość, z jaką nawigacja wśród wielu nawigacja wśród licznych zakładów na platformie to prawdziwa pestka.

eSporty

Wirtualne sporty w kasyno Sportaza http://topkasynoonline.com/review/sportaza-casino/ to kolejna, obok cybersportów, podkategoria platformy, obejmująca popularne gry Counter Strike, League of Legends i Fifa20. Operatorzy strony pokrywają więc naprawdę wszystko, czego można sobie życzyć jako fan zakładów i gier sportowych.

Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

Disappear, she says. I love that word.

Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.

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.

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.

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.

Franz Kafka

The meaning of life is that it stops.

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.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

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

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

Hate is a lack of imagination.

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.

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.

Guy Portman, Charles Middleworth

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

Chuck Klosterman

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

Arthur Nersesian, Manhattan Loverboy

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

Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

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

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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

Franz Kafka

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

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.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

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

Franz Kafka

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

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.

Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries

they’re fucking up minds they do not own.

Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

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

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.

Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

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

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.

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

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

Paul Auster, Invisible

You’re too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.

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

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.

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

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.

Joan Didion

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

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.

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

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

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

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

Niccolò Machiavelli

Never was anything great achieved without danger.

Paul Neilan

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

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.

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.

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.

A C Weisbecker

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

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.

David Peace, Nineteen Seventy Four

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

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.

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.

Arthur Koestler

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Franz Kafka

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

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.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

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

Will Self

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

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!

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.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

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

Arthur Nersesian, Mesopotamia

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

Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy

Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.

Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

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

Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

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

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.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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

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.

Will Self, Grey Area

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

Marquis de Sade

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

Arthur Koestler, Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-1967

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

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.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

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

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

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 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.

Will Christopher Baer

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

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, The Road

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

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.

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.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

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

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 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

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

M Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

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

Paul Auster, The 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.

Jim Carroll

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

Jim Thompson

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

Franz Kafka

All language is but a poor translation.

Franz Kafka

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

Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands

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

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

We live as we dream–alone….

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.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

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

Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies

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

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

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

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

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

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.

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.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

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

Franz Kafka

I am free and that is why I am lost.

David Peace, The Damned Utd

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

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.

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.

James Joyce, Ulysses

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

Ian McEwan, Atonement

She lay in the dark and knew everything.

Will Self

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

Albert Camus

Live to the point of tears.

Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

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

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

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.

Martin Amis, London Fields

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

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

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

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.

Nick Cave

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

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, 1

Big Brother is Watching You.

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.

Allen Ginsberg

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

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.

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.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Mothers are all slightly insane.

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.

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.

Philip K Dick, VALIS

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

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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

Nick Cave

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

Martin Amis, Other People

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Georges Bataille

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

George Orwell, 1984

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

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.

Albert Camus

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

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

Dennis Cooper, Frisk

Human bodies are such garbage bags.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut

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

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.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

And so it goes…

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

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

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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

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.

Iain Banks

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

George Orwell

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

Jim Carroll

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

Will Self

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

Albert Camus

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

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

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

Poppy Z Brite

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

Jack Kerouac

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Knut Hamsun, Hunger

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

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.

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

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

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

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, The Information

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

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.

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

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

J D Salinger, Franny and Zooey

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

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

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

George Orwell

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

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

Philip K Dick, Martian Time-Slip

I’m not much but I’m all I have.

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.

Kelly Braffet, Last Seen Leaving

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

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.

Ryū Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

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

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

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

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

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

Iain Banks, Against a Dark Background

Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.

Nick Cave

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

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.

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

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

Richard Bachman, Rage

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

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.

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.

Iain Banks, Use of Weapons

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

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.

Jim Carroll, Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

James Joyce

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

Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

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

D H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

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

Philip K Dick

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.

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.

Knut Hamsun

Love is every bit as violent and dangerous as murder.

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.

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.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

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

James Joyce

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

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

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

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.

Iain Banks

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

Georges Bataille

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

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?

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.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

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

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.

Vladimir Nabokov

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

R D Ronald

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

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

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

Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

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

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.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I have found God, but he is insufficient.

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, Already Dead

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

Charles Bukowski

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

J G Ballard

Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

Charles Bukowski, Factotum

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

There is no God and we are his prophets.

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

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.

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

I knew every raindrop by its name.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

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.

Anaïs Nin

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

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.

William S Burroughs

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

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

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.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

I have to return some videotapes

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.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

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).

Douglas Coupland

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

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

Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

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

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.

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.

Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

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

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.

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.

Henry Miller

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

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.

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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

I don’t want to die without any scars.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

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.

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.

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–

Hunter S Thomson

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

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

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

Anaïs Nin

How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?

Denis Johnson

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

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

When life sucks, throw yourself into art.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

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

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

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.

Henry Miller

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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?

Henry Miller

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

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

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

J G Ballard, Running Wild

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

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

J G Ballard

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

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

We are most artistically caged.

Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

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

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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

Patrick Süskind, The Pigeon

…he came to the conclusion that you cannot depend on people, and that you can live in peace only if you keep them at arm’s length.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

Italo Calvino

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

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

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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.

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.

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.

J G Ballard, Crash

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

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Eroticize intelligence.

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, The Exit Man

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

Charles Bukowski, Barfly

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

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.

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.

Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

Disappear here

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.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

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

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.

Richard Bachman, Rage

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

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.

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden

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.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Christa Faust

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

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

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

Philip K Dick

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

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

Richard Bachman, Rage

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Georges Bataille, Violent Silence

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

Albert Camus

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

James Joyce, 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.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

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

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.

Will Self

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

Albert Camus

Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead Walk beside me… just be my friend

Albert Camus

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

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

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?

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’.

James Joyce, Ulysses

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

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.

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.

Martin Amis, London Fields

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

George Orwell

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

Nick Cave

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

Allen Ginsberg

I know too much and not enough

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.

Ryū Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

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

Kelly Braffet, Save Yourself

Hate can be just as intimate as love.

Kelly Braffet, Last Seen Leaving

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

Albert Camus

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

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.

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.

Allen Ginsberg

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

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

Philip K Dick, Martian Time-Slip

I’m not much but I’m all I have.

Alissa Nutting, Tampa

William Golding

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

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.

Ian McEwan, Atonement

She lay in the dark and knew everything.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

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

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

And so it goes…

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.

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

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

James Joyce

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

George Orwell

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

Kurt Vonnegut

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

George Orwell, 1984

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

Jim Carroll, Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems

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

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

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

Kurt Vonnegut

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

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

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.

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.

Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly

I have seen myself backward.

Ian McEwan

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

Aldous Huxley

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

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.

Martin Amis, Other People

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

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

Iain Banks

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

Kurt Vonnegut

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

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.

Philip K Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

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

James Joyce, Ulysses

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

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

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

Philip K Dick, VALIS

Philip K Dick

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

George Orwell

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

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.

Kathy Acker

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

George Orwell, 1

Big Brother is Watching You.

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

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

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Ryū Murakami

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

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

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

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

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

Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

Disappear here

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

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

William S Burroughs

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

R D Ronald

Nothing says Christmas better than familicide and anaphylactic shock.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Italo Calvino

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

We are most artistically caged.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

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

Penelope Lively, How it all Began

When you are able to be with a person and there is no need to talk, something has happened.

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.

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

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

Hunter S Thomson

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

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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

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

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.

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.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

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

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

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.

Charles Bukowski

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

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

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

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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

Craig Clevenger, Dermaphoria

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

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I have found God, but he is insufficient.

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

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

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

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

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

Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus

Henry Miller

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

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

I knew every raindrop by its name.

Ken Kesey, Kesey’s Garage Sale

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

There is no God and we are his prophets.

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.

Anaïs Nin

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

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.

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.

Sylvia Plath

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

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.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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.

Anaïs Nin

Ordinary life does not interest me.

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

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

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

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

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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

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

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

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Eroticize intelligence.

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.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

I don’t want to die without any scars.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

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

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.

Anaïs Nin

How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

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

Denis Johnson, Already Dead

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

Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

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

Anaïs Nin

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

Henry Miller

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

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

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

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.

R D Ronald

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

Henry Miller

Anthony Burgess

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

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.

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

When life sucks, throw yourself into art.

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.

Anthony Burgess, Homage To QwertYuiop: Essays

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

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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

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

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.

William S Burroughs

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

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.

Patrick Süskind, The Pigeon

…he came to the conclusion that you cannot depend on people, and that you can live in peace only if you keep them at arm’s length.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

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

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.

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.

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.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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.

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.

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.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

I have to return some videotapes

J G Ballard, Crash

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

Support the Cause

Buy me a coffee