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.
Blake Butler, There Is No Year
Email servers learned to laugh.
Franz Kafka
I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.
Arthur Koestler
Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.
Franz Kafka
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man
We got married: society’s solution to loneliness, lust and laundry.
Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
I thought at the time that I couldn’t be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that’s a common conceit, that you’ve already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.
Marquis de Sade
In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.
Chuck Klosterman
People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation.
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.
Stephen Graham Jones, Mongrels
If you’re not a beautiful monster, then you’re a villager
Franz Kafka
There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe … but not for us.
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.
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.
Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me
There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.
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.
Guy Portman, Charles Middleworth
… her skills more akin to the baking of macaroons than solving the complexities of the universe.
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
Hate is a lack of imagination.
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.
Jim Carroll, The Petting Zoo
Back then, Billy imagined that drops of rain were unanswered prayers falling back to earth.
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.
David Peace, The Damned Utd
You wake up and for those few seconds, minutes, you forget; forget you are injured; forget you are finished.
Joseph Conrad, Chance
Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.
Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn’t just naive it’s a vanity.
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.
Marquis de Sade
Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.
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.
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle.
Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Marquis de Sade
It is only by way of pain one arrives at pleasure
Marquis de Sade
Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.
Franz Kafka
Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.
Guy Portman, Charles Middleworth
Well if being related by internet marriage is family, I suppose we are.
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.
Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
What did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings?
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.
Franz Kafka, The Trial
It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.
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.
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?
Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me
A weed is a plant out of place.
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.
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, You Will Know Me
Because there’s a hundred ways sex can ruin you but there’s no end to the ways love can.
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.
Blake Butler
black beyond black
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, 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.
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.
Paul Auster, Invisible
You’re too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.
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
Eryk Pruitt, HASHTAG
She was like a redneck Yoko Ono.
Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas
Which do you prefer, she says. Sex or Violence?
I try to smile. What’s the difference, really.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
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.
Eryk Pruitt, HASHTAG
Do you understand why I prefer you to have a toy gun?
Paul Auster
You can’t put your feet on the ground until you’ve touched the sky.
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.
A C Weisbecker
If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.
Paul Neilan
Nobody knows how to just shut the fuck up and look out the window anymore.
Jim Carroll
You see, you just don’t know
I’m here to give you my heart
And you want some fashion show
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.
Arthur Nersesian, Mesopotamia
Stressful jobs, loveless marriages, bad food-most people kill themselves slowly every day.
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.
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.
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.
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
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.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.
A C Weisbecker, Cosmic Banditos
Either the present part of the story slowed down a bit and waited for the past part to catch up, or the past part speeded up and overtook the present part.
Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million
Blood helicopters chopped across my slim cerebrum like fresh diamonds, rings in screaming on small hands coming awake inside my linings, each after its own way to reach beyond me.
Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories
If stealing a few saltshakers was wrong I didn’t want to be right.
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.
Thomas Pluck, Dark City Lights
I worked all day in back of a hot van snipping off dog balls, I can cut one more pair.
Megan Abbott, Dare Me
There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.
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.
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.
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.
Aleister Crowley, Moonchild
I’m a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.
Will Self, Grey Area
How much more lonely and driven is the serial monogamist than the serial killer?
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.
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.
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.
Megan Abbott, Dare Me
If it hadn’t been what it was, it would’ve been beautiful.
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.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.
Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
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
Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun
This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born for love and revolution.
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
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.
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.
Jim Thompson
Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle.