Sam > Sam's Quotes

“They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce "Nurse," I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. " You have a lovely pitching arm." You had to go down on them like a hummingbird over a blossom. I saw her much later, not too many years ago, and when I smiled she seemed to believe I was making advances. But it was only that I remembered. I'll never forgot you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows.”
― Don DeLillo, Mao II

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“The death of God left the angels in a strange position.”
― Donald Barthelme

“No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“How can you be alienated without first having been connected?”
― Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

“You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“but if a girl were possible
as I am possible
then marriage would be possible...”
― Gregory Corso

“The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
and robs it. The moon is a thief:
he steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

“Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,' he had said. 'You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

“Look, the world is everywhere: satellites, end tables, the pink and white poinsettias outside the church; reunions and degrees. All those radiant asterisks . . . Soon it will all make sense.”
― Terrance Hayes, Wind in a Box

“A thousand Dreams within me softly burn”
― Rimbaud

“Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.”
― William Gass

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”
― William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts

“And I am in retirement from love. ”
― William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“My mistakes are my life.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Justice? -You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”
― William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own

“If you want to make a million you don't have to understand money, what you have to understand is people's fears about money”
― William Gaddis, J R

“I know what to do with my life. I just don't know what to do with this one night.”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“I knew every raindrop by its name.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

“She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.”
― Denis Johnson