Michael Browne > Michael's Quotes

“What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity”
― David Foster Wallace

“But this road doesn't go anywhere,” I told him.
“That doesn't matter.”
“What does?” I asked, after a little while.
“Just that we're on it, dude,” he said.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No... one... would... care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Disappear here”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life.”
― Hubert Selby, Jr.

“Time has to pass. But sometimes its so goddamn long. Sometimes it just seems to drag and drag and weigh a ton. And hang on you like a monkey. Like its going to suck the blood out of you. Or squeeze your guts out. And sometimes it flies. And is gone somewhere, somehow, before you know it was even here. As if time is only here to make you miserable. That's the only reason for time. To squeeze you. Crush you. To tie you up in knots and make you fucking miserable.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., The Room

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
― Philippe Ariès

“The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it’s indispensable.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Everything is connected to everything else, every story overlaps with every other story.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“You aren't sure whether you have feelings or not but that's all part of the shrug you have performed in slow motion for your entire life so far.”
― Sam Pink, You Hear Ambulance Sounds And Think They Are For You

“He wanted to hide by shrinking past zero, through the dot at the end of himself, to a negative size, into an otherworld, where he would find a place— in an enormous city, too large to know itself, or some slowly developing suburb— to be alone and carefully build a life in which he might be able to begin, at some point, to think about what to do about himself.”
― Tao Lin, Taipei

“On average, since the urge to kill myself isn't so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in.”
― Tao Lin, Taipei

“Life, people learned, was not easy. Life was not cake. Life was not a carrot cake.”
― Tao Lin, Bed

“Talk into here. Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.”
― Denis Johnson , Jesus’ Son

“The first time I didn’t say anything, because she shot me in the mouth.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the thing felt.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

“I thought of a lot of things to do, but they wouldn't work. They all hurt some one else.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five