Darren > Darren's Quotes

“China is a sleeping giant; let him sleep, for if he wakes, he will shake the World.”
― Napoleon

“There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.”
― Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters

“I will not deny that there are men in the district better qualified than I to go to Congress, but, gentlemen, these men are not in the race.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“They're in love. Fuck the war.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“A screaming comes across the sky.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, that republic is Italy.”
― Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City

“Did you know that ninety percent of your average household dust is composed of human epidermal matter? That's skin, to you."
Perhaps this explains your sense of Amanda's omnipresence. She has left her skin behind.”
― Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City

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

“If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“The older the violin, the sweeter the music.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“It's like I told you last night son. The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight, he added”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“With a bit of luck, his life was ruined forever. Always thinking that just behind some narrow door in all of his favorite bars, men in red woolen shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“The possibility of physical and mental collapse is now very real. No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“Live steady. Don't fuck around. Give anything weird a wide berth--including people. It's not worth it. I learned this the hard way, through brutal overindulgence.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

“How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

“I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time

“One of the strangest things about these five downhill years of the Nixon presidency is that despite all the savage excesses committed by the people he chose to run the country, no real opposition or realistic alternative to Richard Nixon’s cheap and mean-hearted view of the American Dream has ever developed. It is almost as if that sour 1968 election rang down the curtain on career politicians. This is the horror of American politics today - not that Richard Nixon and his fixers have been crippled, convicted, indicted, disgraced and even jailed - but that the only available alternatives are not much better; the same dim collection of burned-out hacks who have been fouling our air with their gibberish for the last tenty years. How long, oh Lord, how long? And how much longer will we have to wait before some high-powered shark with a fistful of answers will finally bring us face-to-face with the ugly question that is already so close to the surface in this country, that sooner or later even politicians will have to cope with it? Is this democracy worth all the risks and problems that necessarily go with it? Or, would we all be happier by admitting that the whole thing was a lark from the start and now that it hasn’t worked out, to hell with it.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time

“On Ecstasy, Joan Rivers looks like Pamela Anderson, so imagine what Pamela Anderson looked like.”
― Tommy Lee, The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band

“I announced to everyone that I was embarking on a solo tour. Not a music tour, but a tour of drugs and prostitutes.”
― Tommy Lee, The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band

“This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency? The ugliness of American decoration, American entertainment, American literature - is not this the visible expression of the impoverishment of the European masses, a manifestation of all the backwardness, deprivation, and want that arrived here in boatloads from Europe? The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof. The European traveler, viewing with distaste a movie palace or a Motorola, is only looking into the terrible concavity of his continent of hunger inverted startlingly into the convex. Our civilization, deformed as it is outwardly, is still an accomplishment; all this had to come to light.”
― Mary McCarthy, A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays

“Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.”
― Norman Mailer, An American Dream

“That was how the tears went down Cherry's face...a teaspoon full of ten years' sorrow.”
― Norman Mailer, An American Dream

“I could not begin to mourn Deborah or my mind would ride off with me. There was nothing so delicate in all the world as one's last touch of control.”
― Norman Mailer, An American Dream

“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“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