Batrick Pateman > Batrick Pateman's Quotes

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“All it comes down to is this: I feel like shit but look great.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel...”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done. ”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

“I have to return some videotapes”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“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.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

“I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Sometimes, I look outside, and I think that a lot of other people have seen this snow before. Just like I think that a lot of other people have read those books before. And listened to those songs.
I wonder how they feel tonight.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“What's your favorite book?
"The last one I read.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I'd probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.”
― Joan Didion

“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
― Joan Didion

“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.”
― Joan Didion

“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
― Joan Didion

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”
― Joan Didion

“I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“She moved nearer, leaned her shoulder against me — and we were one, and something flowed from her into me, and I knew: this is how it must be. I knew it with every nerve, and every hair, every heartbeat, so sweet it verged on pain. And what joy to submit to this 'must'. A piece of iron must feel such joy as it submits to the precise, inevitable law that draws it to a magnet. Or a stone, thrown up, hesitating a moment, then plunging headlong back to earth. Or a man, after the final agony, taking a last deep breath — and dying.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin

“The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening. ”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking