Katz > Katz's Quotes

“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“What is unthinkable is undoable”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Reason is always apparent to a discerning eye. But luck? It’s invisible, erratic, angelic.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“I know this because Tyler knows this.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep, and you're never really awake. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Warning: If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don't you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can't think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all that claim it? Do you read everything you're supposed to read? Do you think every thing you're supposed to think? Buy what you're told to want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“I think I realized quite a long time ago that the demon isn't necessarily linked to God; it's not the antithesis of human, or of the soul. It is just a different animal, which has a different diet from humans.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I suppose food is a part of life that most humans can control. They give food a lot of power - food can make a person more beautiful, or less beautiful; it can improve or damage skin; it can make a person's body more attractive, help make hair and nails stronger; it can heal you or slowly kill you. There's also clean food and dirty food; if you eat clean, the message is that you are a clean and pure person; if you eat dirty, then the message is that you are dirty and impure. If you lose control in your life, you can find control in your food.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I'd been wrong about death ... There was no gentle escape. When I had taken those Ambien in Phoenix I thought there was a peaceful way to just kind of disappear. But death wasn't gentle. It was a robber. It stole you out of yourself, and you became a husk.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“In my head I just kept saying, Shut up, shut up! I wanted to say, Don't you know I am dying?
But even in my dying I couldn't be mean to him for fear that he would think I was a bitch. Why did I even care what he thought? Was my death that unimportant? How could I prioritize the feelings of this vacant, mustached kid over my own-me, who was probably dying?”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“This must be Thursday,' said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“It never really goes away, the longing for the life not lived, because isn’t that part of how we come to know ourselves too? Through what we lack as much as what we have, all we dream but do not hold. Some desires have no resolution.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“In the morning I will want to check where the word “resentment” comes from, but the next day I will be too tired to remember which word I had been thinking of tonight”
― Szilvia Molnar, The Nursery

“I'm up to here with cool, okay? I am so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“In the beginning the Universe was created.
This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That's the fundamental nature of glass. And that's why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they're good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.
Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn't be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“Sometimes when a person who loves me expresses care, I feel oppressed.”
― Melissa Broder, Death Valley

“The cactus laughs in silence. Unlike the rocks, I have no voice for it.”
― Melissa Broder, Death Valley

“It’s me who needs the mustache.”
― Melissa Broder, Death Valley

“They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.
Not anymore, though.”
― Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel

“I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart