Books & Authors : Favorite Quotes

You probably already knew that because I've posted it before once or twice.  And please do not call him transgressive. 

The only book of O'Brien's that really took me was The Things They Carried.  I think it's one of the most brilliant books ever written and sits right next to Reasons to Live by Hempel on my list of greats.  Those might be my two favorite books of short stories.

My favorite quote is:

"If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth"

-Tim O'Brien

"I walk the straight lines. I walk through the summer nights. I walk the silver rope of dreams. I walk through dawns of dawns."

"The moon will never lie to anyone. Be like the moon. No one hates the moon or wants to kill it. The moon doesn’t take anti-depresants and never gets sent to prison. The moon never shot a guy in the face and ran away.
The moon’s been around a long time, and has never tried to rip anyone off.
The moon does not care who you are or who you wanna touch or what color you are. The moon treats everyone the same.
The moon never tries to get in on the guest list, or use your name to impress others. Be like the moon.
When others insult and belittle in an attempt to elevate themselves, the moon sits passively and watches, never lowering itself to anything that weak.
The moon is beautiful and reflects the sun’s light brilliantly. It needs no make-up. The moon never shoves clouds out of its way so it can be seen. The moon needs not fame or money to be powerful. The moon never asks you to go to war to defend it.
Be like the moon."

“If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you.”

--Henry Rollins. I could go on and on with quotes of his I love.

"All first drafts are shit." -Hemingway (what a freeing idea)

"The sparrows are flying again." -Stephen King

probably not a lot of Don Henley fans here, and I'm not much of one either, but he has written some killer lines. My favorite: "The more I know, the less I understand".

Far down the blazing strip of concrete a small shapeless mass had emerged and was struggling toward him. It loomed steadily, weaving and grotesque like something seen through bad glass, gained briefly the form and solidity of a pickup truck, whipped past and receded into the same liquid shape by which it came. ~Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

SPOILER "What have you been doing? Having a war or something?" ~William Golding, Lord of the Flies

SPOILER ...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. ~William Golding, Lord of the Flies

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out farther....And one fine morning——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

He knew it was a demon the moment he saw it. He knew it, just as he knew the place was Hell. There was nothing else that either of them could have been. ~Neil Gaiman, "Other People"

Pain can work from the outside in. ~Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a pleasure to see things eaten, to see them blackened and changed. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

There are others, I'm sure. I'm just not thinking clearly at 4:40. Sorry for being obvious.

"Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away"

~ Chuck Palahniuk - Consolation Prizes (Non Fiction)

"Tell me things I won't mind forgetting"

~ Amy Hempel - In the Cemetary where Al Jolson is Buried

"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scars to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace"

~ Chuck Palahniuk - Diary

Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,
And universal Darkness buries All.
 

Alexander Pope, from The Dunciad, Book IV

(yep, the Dunc(e)-iad)

I can believe that things are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned, in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: tehre was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience...
Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people, but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corneres of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel sorry for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies own myriad squirming children? ~Neil Gaiman, American Gods

My mother is a fish. ~William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

"...perhaps you will be able to write the book that I may never get written. The idea is very simple, so simple that if you are not careful you will forget it. It is this--that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified. That's what I want to say. Don't you forget that. Whatever happens, don't you dare let yourself forget." ~Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

A change in environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely. ~Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

"Unless we are willing to accept our artists for who they are, when the question is asked "who speaks for our country today?" the answer is going to be: Advertising agencies" -- Flannery O'connor

"I'm surprised they let her [Jane Austen] die a natural death." -- Mark Twain

"Friends don't let friends get friends haircut"

Did you see that poem that Stark

wrote in college, "An Ode to Clarissa?"

Worst I've read since the case of the

shrinking gypsy stripper's scribblings.

Tell me this:

How do you rhyme

'towards' and 'birds'?

"Dropping, falling...

...diving towards...

Two lovers lost.

Plummeting...

...birds"?

They don't rhyme.

Maybe it's not supposed to rhyme.

Also...

...how do you write a poem

about Clarissa...

...and never have the name

in the poem?

If ever a name deserved, begged

to be in a poem, it's Clarissa.

She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. 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. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have. ~Ian McEwan, Atonement

This is the first Bukowski I ever read. From "You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense"

THE MASTER PLAN

starving in a Philadelphia winter

trying to be a writer

I wrote and wrote and drank and drank and

drank

and then stopped writing and concentrated on

the drinking.

It was another
art-form.

If you can't have any luck with one thing you
try another.

of course, I had been practicing on the
drinking-form
since the age of
15.

and there was much competition
in that field
also.

it was a world full of drunks and writers and
drunk writers.

and so
I became a starving drunk instead of a starving
writer.

the best thing was the instant
result.
and I soon became the biggest and
best drunk in the neighborhood and
maybe the whole
city.

it sure as hell beat sitting around waiting for
those rejection slips from The New Yorker and The
Atlantic Monthly.

of course, I never really considered quitting the
writing game, I just wanted to give it a
ten year rest
figuring if I got famous too early
I wouldn't have anything left for the stretch run
like I have now, thank
you,

with the drinking still thrown
in.