Carmine Hackathorn > Carmine's Quotes

“I’m sitting in the prow-shaped dining room of a tourist steamer, the Georgi Zhukov, on the Yenisei River, which flows from the foothills of Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean, thus cleaving the northern Eurasian plain – a distance of some two and a half thousand versts. Given Russian distances, and the general arduousness of Russian life, you’d expect a verst to be the equivalent of – I don’t know – thirty-nine miles. In fact it’s barely more than a kilometer.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“Yet no one seemed to have thought through the implications of a world in which everyone cheated. The other morning Keith had bought five hundred vanity sachets of Outrage, his staple perfume. At lunchtime he discovered that they all contained water, a substance not much less expensive than Outrage, but harder to sell. Keith was relieved that he had already unloaded half the consignment on Damian Noble in the Portobello Road. Then he held Damian's tenners up to the light: they were crude forgeries. He passed on the notes without much trouble, in return for twenty-four bottles of vodka which, it turned out, contained a misty, faintly scented liquid. Outrage!”
― Martin Amis, London Fields

“You couldn't catch a yawn from someone you didn't like.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“Some junk novels were all about airports. Some junk novels were even called things like Airport. Why, then you might ask, was there no airport called Junk Novel? …Junk novels have been around for at least as long as non-junk novels, and airports haven’t been around for very long at all. But they both really took off at the same time. Readers of junk novels and people in airports wanted the same thing: escape, and quick transfer from one junk novel to another junk novel and from one airport to another airport.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“Venus, I’m sorry that you’ve gone on minding that I didn’t let you drive me to O’Hare. “That’s what we do,” you said: “We drive each other to and from the airport.” Do you realize how rare that is? No one does it anymore, not even newlyweds. All right – it was selfish of me to decline. I said it was because I didn’t want to say goodbye to you in a public place. But I think it was the asymmetry of it that was really troubling me. You and I, we drive each other to and from the airport. And I didn’t want a to when I knew there wouldn’t be a from.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“Aber die alten Zeiten haben mich zum alten Mann gemacht, mein Freund, und wenn ein alter Mann Angst hat, dann geht er nicht einfach so auf eine Sache los, wie er’s getan hat, als er gerade dabei war, zu lernen, wie man sich rasiert.”
― Richard Bachmann

“Love is a fake!” Olson was blaring. “There are three great truths in the world and they are a good meal, a good screw, and a good shit, and that’s all!”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“An dieser Stelle gingen Billy Halleck und die Wahrheit getrennte Wege.”
― Richard Bachmann

“Our destination is the same in the end, but our journey - part chosen, part determined - is different for us all, and changes even as we live and grow.”
― Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

“Marriage is about compromising,’ he told me. ‘Families are about compromising, being anything other than a hermit is about compromising. Parliamentary democracy certainly is.’ He snorted. ‘Nothing but.’ He drained his glass. ‘You either learn to compromise or you resign yourself to shouting from the sidelines for the rest of your life.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Or you arrange to become a dictator. There’s always that, I suppose.’ He shrugged. ‘Not a great set of choices, really, but that’s the price we pay for living together. And it’s that or solitude. Then you really do become a wanker. Another drink?”
― Iain Banks, Stonemouth

“Веет дремотой и покоем, и тебе уютно, как большому сонному коту, обвившемуся хвостом.”
― Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

“What do you want, Patrick?" she sighs.
"I just want peace, love, friendship, understanding," I say dispassionately.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Just read this fabulous screenplay. A remake of Camus's The Stranger with Meursault as a bi break-dancing punk rocker. Randy showed it to me. I loved it. Randy thinks "basically unfilmable" and that filming an orange rolling around a parking lot for three hours would draw a bigger audience.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, The Informers

“I want to go back," Daniel says, quietly, with effort.
"Where?" I ask, unsure.
There's a long pause that kind of freaks me out and Daniel finishes his drink and fingers the sunglasses he's still wearing and says, "I don't know. Just back.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“... Because the writer resented that she had turned to me I became the handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or kindness. That's how I became the damaged party boy who wandered through the wreckage, blood streaming from his nose, asking questions that never required answers. That's how I became the boy who never understood how anything worked. That's how I became the boy who wouldn't save a friend. That's how I became the boy who couldn't love the girl.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms

“You should never mistake affection for … passion,”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“the way to create art is to burn and destroy
ordinary concepts and to substitute them
with new truths that run down from the top of the head
and out of the heart”
― Charles Bukowski

“There is a place in the heart that will never be filled; a space. And even during the best moments, and the greatest times, we will know it.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Finally there is nothing here for death to take away.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“The less I needed, the better I felt.”
― Charles Bukowski

“If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“In the talcum on the floor around him he could see the imprints of his mother's feet. She had moved from side to side, propelled by an over-eager partner, perhaps one of the Japanese officers to whom she was teaching to tango. Jim tried out the dance steps himself, which seemed far more violent than any tango he had ever seen, and managed to fall and cut his hand on the broken mirror.”
― J G Ballard

“To his surprise he felt a moment of regret, of sadness that his quest for his mother and father would soon be over. As long as he searched for them he was prepared to be hungry and ill, but now that the search had ended he felt saddened by the memory of all he had been through, and of how much he had changed. He was closer now to the ruined battlefields and this fly-infested truck, to the nine sweet potatoes in the sack below the driver's seat, even in a sense to the detention center, than he would ever be again to his house in Amherst Avenue.”
― J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun

“All the way down the creek, perched in the windows of the office blocks and department stores, the iguanas watched them go past, their hard frozen heads jerking stiffly… Without the reptiles, the lagoons and the creeks of office blocks half-submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dream-like beauty, but the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-time board-rooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World

“Looking up at the endless tiers of balconies, he felt uneasily like a visitor to a malevolent zoo where terraces of vertically mounted cages contained creatures of random and ferocious cruelty.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.”
― Albert Camus

“I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always decieve ourselves twice about the people we love-first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies”
― Albert Camus