Transgressive Fiction

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Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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

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.

David Peace, The Damned Utd

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

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

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

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.

Franz Kafka

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

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.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

We live as we dream–alone….

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.

Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy

Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.

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.

Marquis de Sade

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

Marquis de Sade

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

Marquis de Sade

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

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.

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.

Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.

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.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

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

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.

Marquis de Sade

It is only by way of pain one arrives at pleasure

Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

Which do you prefer, she says. Sex or Violence?I try to smile. What’s the difference, really.

Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries

they’re fucking up minds they do not own.

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.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

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

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.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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

A C Weisbecker

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

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

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

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 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.

Joan Didion

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

Franz Kafka

All language is but a poor translation.

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.

Graham Greene

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

Marquis de Sade

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

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

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

Will Christopher Baer

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

Thomas Pluck, Dark City Lights

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

Arthur Koestler

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

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.

Jim Thompson

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

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.

David Peace, Nineteen Seventy Four

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

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.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

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

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Franz Kafka

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

Marquis de Sade

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

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.

M Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

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

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.

Franz Kafka

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

Guy Portman, Charles Middleworth

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

Paul Auster

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

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.

Will Self, Grey Area

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

Niccolò Machiavelli

Never was anything great achieved without danger.

Paul Auster, Invisible

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

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.

Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

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

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.

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.

Franz Kafka

I am free and that is why I am lost.

Luke Rhinehart

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

Blake Butler

black beyond black

Franz Kafka

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

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.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

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

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.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

Megan Abbott

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

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

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

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

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

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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

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.

Eryk Pruitt, HASHTAG

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

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.

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.

Franz Kafka

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Franz Kafka

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

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

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.

Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

Disappear, she says. I love that word.

Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

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

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

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

Stephen Graham Jones, After the People Lights Have Gone Off

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

Franz Kafka

I 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.

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

Hate is a lack of imagination.

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?

Philip K Dick, Martian Time-Slip

I’m not much but I’m all I have.

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

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

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

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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

Georges Bataille

In what will survive meI am in harmonywith my annihilation.

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.

J D Salinger, Franny and Zooey

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

Iain Banks

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

J D Salinger, Franny and Zooey

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

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.

Kathy Acker

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

George Orwell

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

Philip K Dick

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Logic is what the devil likes most.

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.

Allen Ginsberg

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

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.

Martin Amis, Other People

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

James Joyce

Shut your eyes and see.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

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

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, 1984

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

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

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

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.

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

George Orwell

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

Knut Hamsun, Hunger

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

Philip K Dick, VALIS

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

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

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.

Poppy Z Brite

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

Aldous Huxley

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Albert Camus

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

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

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

Kathy Acker

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

James Joyce, Ulysses

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

Iain Banks, Use of Weapons

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

Georges Bataille, Violent Silence

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

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

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

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!

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

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

Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly

I have seen myself backward.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

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

Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Albert Camus

Live to the point of tears.

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.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.

Iain Banks

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

Philip K Dick, VALIS

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

Allen Ginsberg

I know too much and not enough

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.

James Joyce

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

William Golding, Pincher Martin

Worse than madness. Sanity.

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

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

George Orwell

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

Will Self

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Jack Kerouac

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

Ian McEwan

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

Ryū Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

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

D H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

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

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.

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.

James Joyce

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

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.

Martin Amis, The Information

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

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.

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.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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

Jim Carroll, Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems

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

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.

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.

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.

Albert Camus

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

Poppy Z Brite

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

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, 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.

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.

William Golding

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

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.

Martin Amis, London Fields

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

Richard Bachman, Rage

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

Kelly Braffet, Last Seen Leaving

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

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.

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.

Charles Bukowski

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

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.

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.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

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

Denis Johnson

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

Anaïs Nin

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

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

Henry Miller

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

Charles Bukowski

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

Charles Bukowski, Factotum

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

The only value of wasted time is knowledge.

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.

Denis Johnson, Already Dead

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

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

William S Burroughs

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

Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

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

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.

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

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

Anthony Burgess

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

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

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

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

I have to return some videotapes

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

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.

Vladimir Nabokov

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

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

Nothing says Christmas better than familicide and anaphylactic shock.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

There is no God and we are his prophets.

Craig Clevenger, Dermaphoria

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

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.

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.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

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

R D Ronald

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

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.

Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

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

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.

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

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

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

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

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

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

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

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

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.

Charles Bukowski, Barfly

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

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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

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

Sylvia Plath

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

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

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

Hunter S Thomson

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

R D Ronald

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

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.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

Chuck Palahniuk, 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.

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, Homage To QwertYuiop: Essays

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

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.

R D Ronald

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

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.

Anaïs Nin

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

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

We are most artistically caged.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.

Hunter S Thomson

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

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I have found God, but he is insufficient.

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.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Eroticize intelligence.

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?

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

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

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

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

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.

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.

William S Burroughs

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

William S Burroughs

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

J G Ballard, Crash

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

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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

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).

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

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

Anaïs Nin

Ordinary life does not interest me.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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.

Charles Bukowski, Post Office

I wanted the whole world or nothing.

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.

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

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

D H Lawrence

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

James Joyce

Shut your eyes and see.

Kathy Acker

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

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

George Orwell

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

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.

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.

Philip K Dick, VALIS

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

William Golding

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

Ian McEwan, Saturday

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

Ian McEwan

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

James Joyce, Ulysses

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

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden

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.

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.

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.

Kelly Braffet, Save Yourself

Hate can be just as intimate as love.

Poppy Z Brite

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

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

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

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.

Ian McEwan

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

Jack Kerouac

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Iain Banks, Against a Dark Background

Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.

George Orwell, 1984

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

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.

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

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

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…

Richard Bachman, Rage

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

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.

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.

Philip K Dick

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Will Self

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

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.

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.

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

D H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

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

Kathy Acker

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

Aldous Huxley

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

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.

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.

James Joyce, Ulysses

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

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

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

Martin Amis, Other People

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

George Orwell, 1984

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Allen Ginsberg

I know too much and not enough

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

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

Georges Bataille

In what will survive meI am in harmonywith my annihilation.

Aldous Huxley

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

Albert Camus

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

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Logic is what the devil likes most.

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

Iain Banks

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

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.

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Albert Camus

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

George Orwell

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

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.

Allen Ginsberg

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

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Georges Bataille, Violent Silence

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

Richard Bachman, Rage

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

Philip K Dick, Martian Time-Slip

I’m not much but I’m all I have.

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.

Jim Carroll, Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems

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

George Orwell

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

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.

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.

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, 1

Big Brother is Watching You.

Dennis Cooper, Frisk

Human bodies are such garbage bags.

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

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

Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

Knut Hamsun

Love is every bit as violent and dangerous as murder.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

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

Kathy Acker, 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.

Georges Bataille

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

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.

Albert Camus

Live to the point of tears.

Albert Camus

Don’t walk in front of me… I may not followDon’t walk behind me… I may not leadWalk beside me… just be my friend

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

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

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

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

J G Ballard

Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

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.

Greg Levin, The Exit Man

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

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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

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

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.

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.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

There is no God and we are his prophets.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

J G Ballard, Running Wild

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

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

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

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

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

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.

Hunter S Thomson

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

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

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

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.

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.

Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

I don’t want to die without any scars.

J G Ballard

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

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

Hunter S Thomson

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

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.

J G Ballard

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

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

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

Charles Bukowski, Post Office

I wanted the whole world or nothing.

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.

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.

William S Burroughs

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

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?

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.

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.

William S Burroughs

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

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

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

Charles Bukowski

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

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.

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.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

R D Ronald

Nothing says Christmas better than familicide and anaphylactic shock.

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.

Anaïs Nin

Ordinary life does not interest me.

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.

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

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

Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction

No one ever likes the right person.

J G Ballard, Crash

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

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

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

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.

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.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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, Invisible Monsters

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

R D Ronald

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

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.

J G Ballard, Crash

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

Italo Calvino

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

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

Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

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

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.

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

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

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

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

Henry Miller

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

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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

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

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

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

Douglas Coupland

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

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.

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.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

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

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

I knew every raindrop by its name.

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.

Craig Clevenger, Dermaphoria

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

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.

Vladimir Nabokov

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

R D Ronald

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

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.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

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

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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

Irvine Welsh

I’m not running away, I’m moving on.

Charles Bukowski

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

Hunter S Thomson

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

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.

Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

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.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

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

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

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