brendan > brendan's Quotes

“BASED is how you feel inside.”
― Brandon McCartney, Takin' Over

“In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.”
― William Burroughs

“Monkeys can't talk, stupid!”
― Jeff Kinney, Rodrick Rules

“Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.”
― Samuel Beckett

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Exterminate all rational thought”
― William Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“Well, for starters, Abraham Lincoln didn't write 'To Kill a Mockingbird.”
― Jeff Kinney, Rodrick Rules

“You and your group of nerds fall into a pit and it's full of dynamite and you blow up. The End.”
― Jeff Kinney, Rodrick Rules

“After the presentations, we had to fill out these questionnaires. The first question was, 'Where do you see yourself in fifteen years?'
I know EXACTLY where I will be in fifteen years: in my pool, at my mansion, counting my money. But there weren't any check boxes for THAT option.”
― Jeff Kinney, Rodrick Rules

“That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Most people don't seem to appreciate a person as honest as me. So don't ask me how George Washington ever got to be president.”
― Jeff Kinney, Rodrick Rules

“The fact that so many books still name the Beatles as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art. Jazz critics have long recognized that the greatest jazz musicians of all time are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all time. Classical critics rank the highly controversial Beethoven over classical musicians who were highly popular in courts around Europe. Rock critics, instead, are still blinded by commercial success. The Beatles sold more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. Jazz critics grow up listening to a lot of jazz music of the past, classical critics grow up listening to a lot of classical music of the past. Rock critics are often totally ignorant of the rock music of the past, they barely know the best sellers.”
― Piero Scaruffi

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“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.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece.”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Nothing is more real than nothing.”
― Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

“How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "green"?”
― Stan Brakhage

“I’m Rick Harrison, and this is my pawn shop. I work here with my old man and my son, Big Hoss. Everything in here has a story and a price. One thing I’ve learned after 21 years – you never know WHAT is gonna come through that door.”
― Rick Harrison

“I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me
whether what I have thought has already been
thought before me by another.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly