Transgressive Fiction

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Cormac McCarthy, The Road

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

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

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

Marquis de Sade

It is only by way of pain one arrives at pleasure

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.

Niccolò Machiavelli

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

Franz Kafka

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

Guy Portman, Charles Middleworth

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

Franz Kafka

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

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

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.

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Arthur Koestler

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Megan Abbott

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

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.

Franz Kafka

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands

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

Franz Kafka

All language is but a poor translation.

Franz Kafka

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

Franz Kafka

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

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.

Franz Kafka

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

Chuck Klosterman

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

Franz Kafka

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Niccolò Machiavelli

Never was anything great achieved without danger.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle.

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!

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.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

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

Paul Neilan

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

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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

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.

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

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

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.

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, 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.

Jim Carroll

You see, you just don’t knowI’m here to give you my heartAnd you want some fashion show

Stephen Graham Jones, Mongrels

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

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.

Graham Greene

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

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.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

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

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.

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

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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

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.

Tanya Thompson, Assuming Names: A Con Artist’s Masquerade

From what I’d witnessed, honesty didn’t really make anyone happy. The truth was a punch to the gut, and while you were falling, a knee to the face, then you could lie on the floor and bleed for a spell.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

Franz Kafka, The Trial

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

Will Self, Grey Area

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

Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.

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.

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

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

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.

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

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

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

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

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.

Joan Didion

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

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.

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.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

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

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 am free and that is why I am lost.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

We live as we dream–alone….

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

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

Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries

they’re fucking up minds they do not own.

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.

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, The Year of Magical Thinking

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

Joseph Conrad, Chance

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

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.

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.

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.

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

Eryk Pruitt, HASHTAG

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

Stephen Graham Jones, After the People Lights Have Gone Off

But at some point you have to just decide that if a bear’s going to eat you, a bear’s going to eat you, and then you go about your day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Franz Kafka

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

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

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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

Megan Abbott, The Fever

I have another friend who gets what I’m really like, and I get her. She scares me. Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?

Aleister Crowley, 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.

Nick Cave

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

Ian McEwan, Atonement

It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.

George Orwell, 1984

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

Ian McEwan, Atonement

She lay in the dark and knew everything.

Georges Bataille

In what will survive meI am in harmonywith my annihilation.

Nick Cave

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

D H Lawrence

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

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

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

Philip K Dick, Martian Time-Slip

I’m not much but I’m all I have.

Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

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

D H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

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

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.

Will Self

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

Martin Amis, House of Meetings

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.

Martin Amis

The 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.

George Orwell

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

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.

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.

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

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

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.

Richard Bachman, Thinner

The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn’t believe what he’s seeing.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

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.

Martin Amis, Other People

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Philip K Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

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

Ray Bradbury

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

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.

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, 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.

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.

Allen Ginsberg

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

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, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

Kelly Braffet, Save Yourself

Hate can be just as intimate as love.

George Orwell

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

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

Jim Carroll, Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems

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

William Golding, Pincher Martin

Worse than madness. Sanity.

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!

Ian McEwan

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

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

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

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

Kathy Acker

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

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.

Albert Camus

Live to the point of tears.

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

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.

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.

Albert Camus

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

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

Will Self

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

Knut Hamsun, Hunger

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

Ryū Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

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

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.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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

Kurt Vonnegut

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

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Iain Banks

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

Tama Janowitz, Slaves of New York

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

Poppy Z Brite

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

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.

James Joyce, Ulysses

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

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

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

Allen Ginsberg

I know too much and not enough

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.

George Orwell, Animal Farm

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

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, Brave New World

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

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.

Aldous Huxley

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

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.

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.

Poppy Z Brite

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

Aldous Huxley

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

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

Richard Bachman, Rage

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

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.

Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Philip K Dick, VALIS

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

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

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

James Joyce

Shut your eyes and see.

Albert Camus

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

George Orwell

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

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

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

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

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

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

Anaïs Nin

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

William S Burroughs

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

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.

Hunter S Thomson

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

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.

Henry Miller

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

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.

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.

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–

Irvine Welsh, Porno

You can’t lie to your soul.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

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

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

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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.

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.

Irvine Welsh

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

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.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

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

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

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.

Charles Bukowski, Barfly

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

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.

Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

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.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

Anaïs Nin

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

William S Burroughs

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

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

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

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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

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.

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.

J G Ballard

Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

Greg Levin, The Exit Man

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

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.

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.

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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

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.

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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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

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.

Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

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

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

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

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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

Denis Johnson, Already Dead

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

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

Vladimir Nabokov

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

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

Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

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

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

I have to return some videotapes

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.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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

Charles Bukowski, Factotum

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

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

Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realize that? It’s the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.

Hunter S Thomson

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

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

When life sucks, throw yourself into art.

Henry Miller

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

That’s what birthdays were. Days when you found out where you stood. Who was on your side and who wasn’t. Nothing to do with how old you were.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

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

Anaïs Nin

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

Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

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

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I have found God, but he is insufficient.

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.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.

Greg Levin, 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.

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).

R D Ronald

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

And so it goes…

George Orwell, 1984

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

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, 1

Big Brother is Watching You.

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?

Ian McEwan, Atonement

She lay in the dark and knew everything.

James Joyce

Shut your eyes and see.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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

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

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.

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.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

George Orwell

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

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.

Kelly Braffet, Save Yourself

Hate can be just as intimate as love.

Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel

Listen, ah don’t wanna speak ill of the dead but have ah told you that mah mother was a great whopping whale of a cunt? Well she was precisely that – a great whopping whale of a hog’s cunt with a dirty maggot for a brain.

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, Franny and Zooey

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

Aldous Huxley

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

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.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

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

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

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

Philip K Dick, Martian Time-Slip

I’m not much but I’m all I have.

J D Salinger, Franny and Zooey

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

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.

Kurt Vonnegut

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

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.

Nick Cave

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

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.

Kelly Braffet, Last Seen Leaving

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Dennis Cooper, Frisk

Human bodies are such garbage bags.

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

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

Georges Bataille, Violent Silence

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

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

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

George Orwell

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

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

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

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

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

Aldous Huxley, 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, 1984

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

Albert Camus

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

Richard Bachman, Rage

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

Jim Carroll

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to 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.

Iain Banks

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

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.

Albert Camus

Live to the point of tears.

James Joyce, Ulysses

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

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.

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Logic is what the devil likes most.

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, Mother Night

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

George Orwell, 1984

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Iain Banks, Against a Dark Background

Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.

George Orwell, Animal Farm

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Kurt Vonnegut

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

Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

Ray Bradbury

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

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

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

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

Georges Bataille

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

Martin Amis, Other People

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Jack Kerouac

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.

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.

James Joyce, Ulysses

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

Iain Banks

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

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.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

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

Aldous Huxley

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

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.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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

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.

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

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

Georges Bataille

In what will survive meI am in harmonywith my annihilation.

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.

Albert Camus

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

Poppy Z Brite

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

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.

Georges Bataille

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

Will Self

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Richard Bachman, Thinner

The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn’t believe what he’s seeing.

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.

William Golding, Pincher Martin

Worse than madness. Sanity.

Philip K Dick

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I have found God, but he is insufficient.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

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

R D Ronald

This faulty light fitting at the front door with the dangerously flickering bulb looks rather festive. Who says I don’t do Christmas?

Chuck Palahniuk, 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.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

There is no God and we are his prophets.

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

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

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

The only value of wasted time is knowledge.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

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

Charles Bukowski, Barfly

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

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.

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.

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.

J G Ballard

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

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

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

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.

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Henry Miller

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

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.

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.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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

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.

Douglas Coupland, Life After God

Anthony Burgess, Homage To QwertYuiop: Essays

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

Hunter S Thomson

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

Bret Easton Ellis

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

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

William S Burroughs

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

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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

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

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.

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.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

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.

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.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

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.

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

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.

Anthony Burgess

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

Ken Kesey, Kesey’s Garage Sale

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.

Denis Johnson, Already Dead

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Eroticize intelligence.

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.

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

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

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.

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–

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

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).

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.

Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction

What does that mean know me, know me, nobody ever knows anybody else, ever! You will never know me.

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

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.

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.

J G Ballard, Crash

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

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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?

Hunter S Thomson

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

Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

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

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

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

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

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

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.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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

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.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

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

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.

Hunter S Thomson

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

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, Less Than Zero

Disappear here

Italo Calvino

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

I don’t want to die without any scars.

Irvine Welsh

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

Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

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

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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

Anaïs Nin

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

R D Ronald

Nothing says Christmas better than familicide and anaphylactic shock.

R D Ronald

I’m the biggest critic of my own work, but sometimes you nail a chapter so good that you have to take a step back and admire that bitch.

Charles Bukowski, Factotum

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

Irvine Welsh

I’m not running away, I’m moving on.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

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

William S Burroughs, Naked Lunch

You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative

Anaïs Nin

Ordinary life does not interest me.

Henry Miller

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

Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

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

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

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

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