Grant Wallace > Grant's Quotes

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Does she make the heavens fall?" "Yes, she pulls down everything." Molinari nodded. "It's a psionic talent she has... it's called being a woman.”
― Philip K. Dick, Now Wait For Last Year

“I hope I never get in a fix like that," Taubman said. "Hating someone I once loved.”
― Philip K. Dick, Now Wait For Last Year

“It's the way a man chooses to limit himself that determines his character. A man without habits, consistency, redundancy - and hence boredom - is not human. He's insane.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“To change man, the audience by which he judges himself must be changed. A man is defined by his audience: by the people, institutions, authors, magazines, movie heroes, philosophers by whom he pictures himself being cheered and booed.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“But we must come to realise that every word is perfect, including those we scratch out. As my pen moves across this page the whole world writes. All of human history combines at this mere moment now to produce in the flow of this hand a single dot: Who are you and I, dear friends, to contradict the whole past of the universe? Let us then in our wisdom say yes to the flow of the pen.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused? It was the Goddam sense of having a self.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“We got married: society's solution to loneliness, lust and laundry.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“ Give up all hope, all illusion, all desire..I've tried. I've tried and still I desire, I still desire not to desire and hope to be without hope and have the illusion I can be without illusions..Give up, I say. Give up everything, including the desire to be saved.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“New places and new roles forced me into acute awareness of how others were responding to me. When a human is being himself, flowing with his inner nature, wearing his natural appropriate masks, integrated with his environment, he is normally unaware of subtleties in another's behavior. Only if the other person breaks a conventional pattern is awareness stimulated. However, breaking my established patterns was threatening to my deeply ingrained selves and pricked me to a lvel of consciousness which is unusual, unusual since the whole instinct of human behavior is to find environments congenial to the relaxation of consciousness. By creating problems for myself I created thought.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”
― Stephen King , The Stand

“No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side.

Or you don't.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizen should be: partisans but never zealots, respectors of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely unable to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered . . . or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“It's hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else's.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“You know what truth is? [...] It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, "Yeah, yeah - ain't it the truth?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir." he read, "You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next - and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine. Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines. You are pooped and demoralized, " read Dwayne. "Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“To live is to be haunted.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Why is love so good...? You love someone and they leave. They come home one day and you say "What's happening?" and they say, "I got a better offer someplace else," and there they go, out of your life forever, and after that until you're dead you're carrying around this huge hunk of love with no one to give it to. And if you do find someone to give it to, the same thing happens all over.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Because her general taste appalled him, it annoyed him that he himself constituted one of her favorites. It was an anomaly which he had never been able to take apart.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“The smile that folded the puffed eyelids and creased the sagging cheeks was fixed and forced. I’d seen such smiles in mortuaries on the false face of death. It reminded me that I was going to grow old and die.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target

“I like a little danger. Tame danger, controlled by me. It gives me a sense of power, I guess, to take my life in my hands and know damn well I’m not going to lose it.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target

“I felt like a lonely cat, an aging tom ridden by obscure rage, looking for torn-ear trouble. I clipped that pitch off short and threw it away. Night streets were my territory, and would be till I rolled in the last gutter.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool

“There’s a contradiction in your thinking,” I said. “If I took your dirty money, you wouldn’t be able to trust my honesty.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool

“A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again.”
― Stephen King, Bag of Bones

“Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.”
― Stephen King, Bag of Bones

“Fear is actually an acronym for Fuck Everything And Run.”
― Stephen King, Bag of Bones