Rosella Sickels > Rosella's Quotes

“Now in those days, my brothers, the teaming up was mostly by fours and fives, these being like auto-teams, for being a comfy number for an auto, and six being the outside limit for gang-size. Sometimes gangs would gang up so as to make like malenky armies for big nightwar, but mostly it was best to roam in these like small numbers.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Özgür irade ile seçilen kötülük, organize güçler tarafından kişiye dayatılan deterministik iyilikten daha mı insancadır ?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backward glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.... It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“He was talking about the sign that said 'THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.'
'All knew was that I didn't want my daughter or anybody's child to see a message that negative every time she comes into the library,' he said. 'And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.'
'What's so negative about it?' I said.
'What could be a more negative word than "futility"?' he said.
'"Ignorance,"' I said.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“The brutal reality of politics would be probably intolerable without drugs.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

“You grow up to become living proof of your parents' limitations. Their less-than masterpiece.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

“Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“You only ask people about themselves so you can tell them about yourself.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Oh love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I'll be anybody you want me to be.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“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

“I wonder if – as I tumble towards the waves – I’ll have time to get the iPhone out, hit Facebook and change my status to ‘Dead’.”
― Iain Banks, Stonemouth

“And I felt next to nothing as I walked to the village; I paid my respects to the countryside yet was unable to detect solemn sympathy in its quiet or reproach in its stillness. Usually that road brought me miles of footage from the past: the bright-faced ten-year-old running for the Oxford bus; the lardy pubescent, out on soul-rambles (i.e. sulks), or off for a wank in the woods; the youth, handsomely reading Tennyson on summer evenings, or trying to kill birds with feeble, rusted slug-guns, or behind the hedge smoking fags with Geoffrey, then hawking in the ditch. But now I strode it vacantly, my childhood nowhere to be found.”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

“Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time.”
― Martin Amis

“Have you noticed, now, the way people talk so loudly in snackbars and cinemas, how the shelved back gardens shudder with prodigies of talentlessness, drummers, penny-whistlers, vying transistors, the way you see and hear the curses and sign-language of high sexual drama at the bus-stops under ghosts of clouds, how life has come out of doors? And in the soaked pubs the old-timers wince and weather the canned rock. We talk louder to make ourselves heard. We will all be screamers soon.”
― Martin Amis, Money

“And there was something that frightened me much more. If I went to the doctor's tomorrow, and was cured by, say, the weekend, there'd be no relief from anxiety, just different anxiety. Even as the antibiotics hosed down my genitals, the mind's bacteria would be forming new armies. I'd come up with something to get me down...

Was this the case with everyone -- everyone, that is, who wasn't already a thalidomide baked-bean, or a gangrenous imbecile, or degradingly poor, or irretrievably ugly, and would therefore have pretty obvious targets for their worries? If so, the notion of 'having problems' -- or 'having a harder life than most people', or 'having a harder life than you usually had' -- was spurious. You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change.”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

“Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)”
― Martin Amis, Money

“It began as a mistake.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

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