Left > Left's Quotes

“I've already said an addict is a person with holes. These holes are either congenital, shot out, or carved and eaten away at until what remains is this thing, the hole. The hole can never be filled. The thing most likely to fill the hole is love, but love is fleeting, unreliable, conditional. Drugs are unconditional.”
― Brad Phillips, Essays and Fictions

“I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“To be close to me is also to learn how to cope--to cope with how I cope.”
― Brad Phillips, Essays and Fictions

“weekend at bernie's is not a realistic movie”
― brad phillips

“You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Is my paranoia getting completely out of hand, or are you mongoloids really talking about me?”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“It smells terrible in here.'

Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“My life is a rather grim one. One day I shall perhaps describe it to you in great detail.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today's employer is seeking. ”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylised glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“The state is controlling my destiny and my penis.”
― Russell Greer, Why I'm Making It Legal for Your 18 Year Old Daughter to Get In Bed with a Complete Stranger for Only 500 Bucks: A Short Essay from a Pro Se Litigant who is Challenging the Utah Brothel Bans

“We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But then you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.”
― Camille Paglia

“Space echoes like an immense tomb, yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die ?”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”
― Nick Land

“Only prisoners have time to read, and if you want to engage in a twenty-year long research project funded by the state, you will have to kill someone.”
― Mark Fisher

“those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“The past cannot be forgotten, the present cannot be remembered”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”
― Herman Hesse

“When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”
― Virginia Woolf