Ian > Ian's Quotes

“Suddenly, political sucksters and realistic insectivores, shoving to the front, puffed up their stomachs and blew lies out of their fingers! A parade was formed! It was now an assembly on the arch, an enthusiastic troop of dunces, pasquil-makers, populist scribblers and lick-penny poets, anti-intellectual hacks, modernistic rubbishmongers, anonymuncules of prose and anacreontic water-bibbers all screaming nonce-words and squealing filthy ditties. They shouted scurrilities! They pronounced words backwards! They tumbled along waggling codpieces, shaking hogs' bladders, and bugling from the fundament! Some sang, shrill, purposely mispronouncing words, snarping at the language to mock it while thumping each other with huge rubber phalluses and roaring out farts! They snapped pens in half and turned somersaults with quills in their ears to make each other laugh, lest they speak and then finally came to the lip of a monstrously large hole, a crater-like opening miles wide, which, pushing and shoving, they circled in an obscene dance while dressed in hoods with long earpieces and shaking firebrands, clackers, and discordant bells!”
― Alexander Theroux

“He loved the shop, the smells of the naphthas and benzenes, the ammonias, all the alkalis and fats, all the solvents and gritty lavas, the silken detergents and ultimate soaps, like the smells, he decided of flesh itself, of release, the disparate chemistries of pore and sweat—a sweat shop—the strange wooly-smelling acids that collected in armpits and atmosphered pubic hair, the flameless combustion of urine and gabardine mixing together to create all the body’s petty suggestive alimentary toxins. The sexuality of it. The men’s garments one kind, the women’s another, confused, deflected, masked by residual powders, by the oily invisible resins of deodorant and perfume, by the concocted flower and the imagined fruit—by all fabricated flavor. And the hanging in the air, too—where would they go?—dirt, the thin, exiguous human clays, divots, ash and soils, dust devils of being.”
― Stanley Elkin

“… their piss on fire and their shit molten, boiling sperm and their ovaries frying; what they were permitted of body sprinting at full throttle, wounded gallop, burning not fat—fat sizzled off in the first seconds, bubbled like bacon and disappeared, evaporate as steam, though the weight was still there, still with you, its frictive drag subversive as a tear in a kite and not even muscle, which blazed like wick, but the organs themselves, the liver scorching and the heart and brains at flash point, combusting the chemistries, the irons and phosphates, the atoms and elements, conflagrating vitamin, essence, soul …”
― Stanley Elkin

“MIDSUMMER: the shortest night. The year on its side. Joblard is to marry. To make that act, that avowal: St Bartholomew-the-Great. The Chemical Wedding, sponsus and sponsa, merging in song, twisting around the columns of that stone forest; celebrated here in the blending of russian stout, nigredo, with dry blackthorn cider. The risks crowd us, cackle; magpies at the window.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

“Under the skin of man is a wondrous jungle where veins like lush tropical growths hang along over-ripe organs and weed-like entrails writhe in squirming tangles of red and yellow. In this jungle, flitting from rock-gray lungs to golden intestines, from liver to lights and back to liver again, lives a bird called the soul.”
― Nathanael West

“Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today.”
― DH Lawrence

“The Bon Ton had just dined, too well, from fruit flip à la Bon Ton, mulligatawny soup, filet of sole sauté, choice of or both poulette emincé and spring lamb grignon, and on through to fresh strawberry ice cream in fluted paper boxes, petits fours, and demi-tasse. Groups of carefully corseted women stood now beside the invitational plush divans and peacock chairs, paying twenty minutes' after-dinner standing penance. Men with Wall Street eyes and blood pressure slid surreptituous celluloid toothpicks and gathered around the cigar stand. Orchestra music flickered. Young girls, the traditions of demure sixteen hanging by one-inch shoulder straps, and who could not walk across a hardwood floor without sliding the last three steps, teetered in bare arm-in-arm groups, swapping persiflage with pimply, patent-leather-haired young men who were full of nervous excitement and eager to excel in return badinage.”
― Fannie Hurst

“There are men of esprit who are excessively exhausting to some people. They are the talkers who have what may be called jerky minds. Their thoughts do not run in the natural order of sequence. They say bright things on all possible subjects, but their zigzags rack you to death. After a jolting half- hour with one of these jerky companions, talking with a dull friend affords great relief. It is like taking the cat in your lap after holding a squirrel.”
― George Augustus Sala

“The byssus cloth, striated like the bandelets of the sphinx, produces of itself luminous undulations. Upon it are enormous quarters of red meats; huge fish; birds cooked in their plumage, and quadrupeds in their skins; fruits with colors and tints almost human in appearance; while fragments of cooling ice, and flagons of violet crystal reflect each other's glittering. Anthony notices in the middle of the table a boar smoking at every pore—with legs doubled up under its belly, and eyes half closed—and the idea of being able to eat so formidable an animal greatly delights him. Then many things appear which he has never seen before—black hashes, jellies, the color of gold, ragouts in which mushrooms float like nenuphars upon ponds, dishes of whipt cream light as clouds.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“The water hits, and biology asserts itself. You are not a tired balloon of cerebral activity; you are a body, and you are being challenged. You gulp air; your pulse thumps. Your brain, meanwhile, your lovely, furry old brain, goes glacier-blue with shock. Thought is abolished. Personality is abolished. You’re a nameless mammal under a ravening jet of cold water. It’s a kind of accelerated mindfulness, really: In two seconds, you’re at the sweet spot between nonentity and total presence. It’s the cold behind the cold; the beautiful, immobile zero; a flame of numbness bending you to its will.”
― James Parker

“Here are to be seen distorted, grimacing faces, half-hairless skulls, gaping sides, showing through the ribs, as through a grate, lungs like dried and withered sponges; here the flesh is reduced to dust, and the bones are coming through: there the skin, no longer sustained by the fibres of the cell-tissue, but turned to the consistency of parchment, floats about the skeleton like a second shroud. None of the heads has the impassive calm set by death as its supreme seal upon all that it touches; their mouths open in a horrid yawn, as if convulsed by the immeasurable weariness of eternity, or wear the sardonic sneer of nothingness mocking at life; their jaws are out of joint, the muscles of their necks are swollen; their fists are clenched in fury, their backbones are bent in the contortions of despair.”
― Théophile Gautier

“Her dress of sleazy silk was bright burned orange painted with black sail-boats sailing over purple trees and red football players playing over steeples and white skiers skiing over sail-boats cascading to the hem and locked acrobats, the entire field of outdoor sports, it seemed, being on her body, for her scarf was painted with spidery tennis players and tennis nets and ice￾skaters skating on silver ponds and red polo riders riding red horses, and there were little footballs hanging from her charm bracelets, tennis rackets and ice-skates and golf clubs and numerous other trophies, some of field and stream, satin fishes running around the hem of her chiffon petticoat edged with yellow lace, butterflies embroidered upon the knees of her thin silk stockings, and her skirts came up high above her knees, higher when she moved, showing her yellow satin garters and pairs of stuffed red valentine hearts dangling from ribbons and faces which were painted powder puffs, and the coat seemed shrunken or a size too small like something she might have worn in a remote youth. Her head was big on a narrow stem, her bleached yellow hair spirally built upward to a skein crowned with a spangled net and a hat which was a woven nest of dark and dusty funeral blossoms and ivory twigs with a pink enameled branch on which was ·perched, precariously at that high altitude in the cold air current, one stuffed yellow canary with a moth-eaten wing, a glassy eye.”
― Marguerite Young

“There were deep green faces, dipped in sea dye, with painted cockles for mouths and lichenous hair, sealed on the cheeks; red and purple, slate-grey, tide-marked, rat-brown and stickily white-washed, with violent-inked eyes or lips the colour of Stilton; pink chopped, pink lidded, pink as the belly of a newborn monkey, nicotine yellow with mustard flecked eyes, rust scraping through the bleach, black hairs axlegreased down among the peroxide; squashed fly stubbles, salt-cellared necks thick with pepper powder; carrotheads, yolkheads, blackheads, heads bald as sweetbreads.”
― Dylan Thomas

“Horror on horror, waxy, sweating, gashed, on all sides were dead chunks of flesh on which some livid parasite bloomed and spread, the scarlet ropes and strings of half a pinched ascetic face, a thorax spilling all its fruit in rotting tropical brilliance, greens, speckled purples and umbers. And in the gloom that smelt of mould, a tray, an egg, the egg dividing, dividing again, budding, growing, hollowing itself, mad to begin its life, and ending round, pitted, a golf ball. But not lost, carried then to the wall cases, injected into the seven wombs, growing still, larger, involuting, adding a cord, hanging, the flesh yielding in livid wax sprinkled with sparse discoloured hairs.”
― John Rodker

“Waves crashing against black port-holes at midnight. Bugles blowing in sour corridors - redcarpeted corridors which suddenly, unaccountably, became hills to climb. O God, what a prospect! And the ship - what was the ship? A congregation of gigantic mushroom-like ventilators, red-throated, all belching a smell of hot oil and degenerate soup, with sounds of faint submarine clankings. Among them, a few pale stewards, faces like cauliflowers, carrying gladstone bags and hot-water bottles.”
― Conrad Aiken

“Emptying. Airmail: the garbage parts flutter and glide and plummet, thrown out in a sweet, athletic arc. They drop through morning sunlight into shade. The bag pulls its ripcord: disintegrates. Cans' flat bottoms wink sun back, flash-flash, end over end: C and C Cola, Cerveza Rheingold, Raid ( do not incinerate), Cafe Bustelo and Spam. One 25-watt bulb that sizzles like a small maraca. Eggshells, crusts, fat-absorbent Bounty towels: all orts of breakfast. Bill-less, an old Mets cap brakes its fall, the vacant cranium taking in air. Garbage hits the historic roof below, bonging off original hand-hewn shingles, circa 1640. Things round roll, faking yawn noises with their hollowness, down/into an aluminum gutter, circa 1976. Con Ed bills, second-language homework, sheets of La Prensa descend in pendulum jerks, tick-tock, tick-tock. Then, persuaded by a breeze, they flock southeast, away from the roof of Van Lynxx Manor, over the rose garden, over the cemetery, over the thickset, grouchy chapel, over the disheveled orchard, toward Hollis and Forest Hills. Tap-tap: garbage can edge on twelfth-floor balcony rail. An afterthought brown apple gets pitched from the low-rent altitude, fine arm action and follow-through, hooking leftward, sharp slider. It hits the ancient chimney, bounces, bursts to mouthfuls, which bounce, burst and are gone.”
― D. Keith Mano

“Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice. Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the colour of grey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and the loin cloth. The knees had been forced together and the rotulae touched, but the lower legs were held wide apart, though the feet were placed one on top of the other. These, beginning to putrefy, were turning green beneath a river of blood. Spongy and blistered, they were horrible, the flesh tumefied, swollen over the head of the spike, and the gripping toes, with the horny blue nails …”
― J.K. HUYSMANS

“WITH the advent of night a fantastic city all of fire suddenly rises from the ocean into the sky. Thousands of ruddy sparks glimmer in the darkness, limning in fine, sensitive outline on the black background of the sky, shapely towers of miraculous castles, palaces, and temples. Golden gossamer threads tremble in the air. They intertwine in transparent, flaming patterns, which flutter and melt away in love with their own beauty mirrored in the waters. Fabulous and beyond conceiving, ineffably beautiful, is this fiery scintillation. It burns but does not consume. Its palpitations are scarce visible. In the wilderness of sky and ocean rises the magic picture of a flaming city. Over it quiver the reddening heavens, and below the water reflects its contours, blending them into a whimsical blotch of molten gold.”
― Maxim Gorky

“Run a tank over the geraniums, turn the wind up to hurricane so the daisies' heads tear off and hurtle through the air like bullets, drop the baby from the balcony and watch the mother swan-dive after him, with her snarled Ophelia hair and addled screams.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Then, when everything was lifted out - the mass of organs held in the arms, a cornucopia of dripping fruits hoisted to the hanging scale... There were yellow layers of fat, yellow as a cartoon sun, as sweet cream butter, laid thinly on some, in slabs on others. There were the ice-blue casings of large intestines, the small sloshing stomach, transparent, to be drained. The bladder, hidden, but pulled into view for my sake and cupped in hand like a water balloon. Cracks and snappings. The whisking and shushing of knives over skin, a sound like tearing silk.”
― Lia Purpura

“It was as if some great master, stricken by dementia, had burst his whole color-box against the sky to deafen the inner eye of the world. Cloud and water mixed into each other, dripping with colors, merging, overlapping, liquefying, with steeples and balconies and roofs floating in space, like the fragments of some stained-glass window seen through a dozen veils of rice paper.”
― Lawrence Durrell

“...he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line. So he falls into consumption and sickness, blows his brains out, turns his face to the wall. It matters not in what attitude they find him. He has passed through the gates of Death and known the flames of Hell.”
― Virginia Woolf

“... he lives on nuts from Selfridges, and a few vegetables, and has visions, and wears boots with soles like slabs of beef, and an orange tie; and then his wife crept out of her hole, all blue with orange hair, and cryptic ornaments, serpents, you know, swallowing their tails...”
― Virginia Woolf

“With their pinched skull-faces and their tufting professorial hair, they resembled a tribe of pygmy Lord Longfords - flinching, purse-lipped from the pain of the world. Delicate human hands fluttered vaporously, or masturbated in absorbed lethargy.”
― Iain Sinclair

“Just as he and curator entered the hall where the stone effigies of copulating monsters were kept, the lights failed. Darkness brought about an instant regression. The granite faces leered in the brief flicker of matches. Eisenstein, freed from all inhibitions in the camouflaging dark, groped his way down their protuberant bellies to find their sexual organs. Then the sudden return of electricity ejected him into the twentieth century, with its shame and shiftiness, its ignorance of both divinity and carnality.”
― Peter Conrad

“It is her mother’s exhausted face leaning over the crib, relieved the colicky screams have stopped at last, such a good girl, both of them happy now as she sucks her sugar water, swallows, sucks, gulps. It is her hopscotch-scraped knee with its grid of blood, her little girl tears, the kiss-it-better not working and so the butterscotch candies uncellophaned fast from grandma’s purse, it is the sticky butter-sweet glowing her blood, and all is fine now, all is good. It is the big girl finishing her glass of milk and so the reward of Whoppers Malted Milk Balls mumping her cheeks, smiles all around. It is look she’s finished her homework cleaned her room eaten her glazed carrots at dinner, and so now the nipple’d sweet of a Hershey’s Kiss poking out her cheek, the tiny crunch of M&M’s candy coatings, and how long can she hold the creamy brown melt in her mouth. It is the Halloween bounty, the season of candy corn and Tootsie Pops, the gritty sweet sand of Pixy Stix, the plastic orange pumpkin weighted with mini Mounds and Snickers and Milky Ways and Baby Ruths, all careful-parent examined for razor blades, for evil tamperings, then given back for sock-drawer hoarding that lasts only days, not the promised months. Fruits are the lab-made, ascorbic-acid flavors of Skittles and Starbursts and Jelly Bellies, raisins are Raisinets, almonds mean marzipan and Almond Joys, milk is a vehicle for Nesquik strawberry or chocolate syrups, sucked through red licorice Twizzler straws. It is the quivering anticipation of birthday cakes with the biggest pinkest prettiest sugar rose for the birthday girl, the backyard piñata attacked and attacked and attacked with baseball bat frenzy until she is showered with manna. Easter is creamy Cadbury Eggs, Thanksgiving is candied yam casserole peaked with marshmallow crust, Christmas is the faux-minty red-and-white swirl of candy canes sucked into spears, the pot of melting caramel meant to golden the popcorn garlands and shellac the apples, instead mouth-spooned away at the stove. It is the zoo the circus the carnival, all ballet-pink gossamer puffs of cotton candy crunched to hard coral between her teeth. It is the bloodbeat rush, the delirium, sailing soar into bliss, and then the plummet and bitter crash, the jitters and shakes. It is acidic pantings and acrid sweatings and belly flesh bulging around the elastic of panties and training bras, it is claiming a stomachache to duck the bleachers-running or rope-climbing or naked locker room of gym, it is the yearly mouthful of Novocain needle and new silver-filling glints rewarded with a gleaming, jewel-colored lollipop. It is the terror of beach parties or swim parties and the mumbled, towel-mummied excuses of sunburning so easily. It is her teenage Saturday nights baking Betty Crocker brownies alchemized into bigger higher happiness soars with added bags of Reese’s Pieces and Nestlé chocolate chips. It is the sweet boy, the cute kind caring boy in English lit who smiles, compliments her understanding of Shakespearean metaphor, comes to her house after school for quiz study, sits on her bed and eats half a pan of her offered brownies while she chatters away, then sweet-mouth kisses her silent, once, the chocolate masking the breath going sour, then nudges her head to his lap, to his opening fly, to the hard sucking candy and sweat and come filling her mouth, her throat, her belly, even as she suspects, knows, this is all she will get, all she deserves, but let me have it now, this sweetness, more and more and more, give it to me, it is so good.”
― Tara Ison

“There he presides, variously Olympian, over the dreary 1820 wallpapers and sofas and card-tables, key-patterned or sham Gothic, but all faded and dust-engrained; among the dismal collections of ores and crystals and skulls and stuffed birds : a pantalooned and stocked and swallow-tailed Rentier Faust. And round him that court of huge blackened casts, Ludovisi Junos and Rondanini Joves, and various decapitated Adorantes and Ilioneuses ; that other company of faded ladies, stomachered or short-waisted, Lottes and Lilis and Maximilianes and Christianes, Suleikas, Gretchens, and Ottilies, on whose love and love for him (as on the succulent roast ox-thighs of Homeric days) the god Wolfgang nourished and increased his own divinity.”
― Vernon Lee

“So that all the flesh would drop from the long frame, the muscles dry and fall apart, the eyes be sightless, and the brain dark; and the little busy insects of the earth would carry away the fragments bit by bit, and on the field where he lay would be found at last only the hollow skull once so full of proud purpose; only the slack white bones of the arm that had wielded the strong sword, the vast arch of the gaunt ribs that once had sheltered the brave heart of Syracuse. And among these dry bones little curious creatures would come to peep and peer and build their homes; spiders spinning webs over the empty eye sockets, mice weaving their nests among the wideflung knuckles …”
― Elizabeth Bisland

“The cliché is that illness shows the mottled wolf skull beneath the pampered skin – but it can also be a welcome corridor, returning you to places you’d left behind. Suddenly, in the antiseptic hospital room one afternoon, you remember them all: so many unstarry things. The way shadows caressed a wall in a vacant lot in Berlin, one rainy November day in … 1976, was it? A scrum of garish fans surrounding you on Sunset Boulevard. Postwar London, whose bombsites seemed to harbour all the time in the world. Make-up counters, listening booths, bakelite curves, saloon bar mirrors, diamanté in a jewellery box that played Swan Lake when the lid clicked up. The strange snake hiss of early TV. A new world inventing itself in the middle of the 20th century, when images were things that genuinely shocked, carriers of forbidden knowledge. Something torn from a Hollywood gossip mag or a single image in a clunky library book on Surrealism could literally change your life. Penguin Modern Classic paperbacks; Genet and his cruisey down-is-up theology; Andy and his abyssal Wow. The surprising new meanings ‘love’ could develop far away from home. Backstage’s suffocating air. The way she walked; the way she talked.”
― Ian Penman

“I am beginning to understand the curiously dangerous charm of this place: the electric harmonies of sea, and sky, the startling sunshine, the southern glory, and glamour, the thrilling beauty of the palm gardens, the sweet caressing airs from snowcapped hills, the strange sharp chill touching lips and cheeks, intensifying every feeling and emotion, and playing havoc with the psychical apparatus of prosaic life.”
― David Macbeth Moir