Chara Bayley > Chara's Quotes

“it should be the likes ay us that agitate for change, but aw we dae is drugs.”
― Irvine Welsh, Porno

“Without this kickstart to my day, I'd be lost. A day without a morning run is a day you fumble through, rather than one you attack.”
― Irvine Welsh, The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins

“As if the physical proximity can make up for the emotional distance.”
― Irvine Welsh, Ecstasy

“What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“how come you're so ugly?"

"my life has hardly been pretty — the hospitals, the jails, the jobs, the women, the drinking. some of my critics claim that i have deliberately inflicted myself with pain. i wish that some of my critics had been along with me for the journey. it’s true that i haven't always chosen easy situations but that's a hell of a long ways from saying that i leaped into the oven and locked the door. hangover, the electric needle, bad booze, bad women, madness in small rooms, starvation in the land of plenty, god knows how i got so ugly, i guess it just comes from being slugged and slugged again and again, and not going down, still trying to think, to feel, still trying to put the butterfly back together again…it’s written a map on my face that nobody would ever want to hang on their wall.

sometimes i’ll see myself somewhere…suddenly…say in a large mirror in a supermarket…eyes like little mean bugs…face scarred, twisted, yes, i look insane, demented, what a mess…spilled vomit of skin…yet, when i see the “handsome” men i think, my god my god, i’m glad i’m not them”
― Charles Bukowski, Charles Bukowski: Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters 1963-1993

“unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it”
― charles bukowski

“if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Are you becoming what you've always hated?”
― Charles Bukowski, Hollywood

“Sometimes he missed the numbed, walking-underwater feeling feel that the cocktail of narcotics used to give him. But if a situation went down in here, he was going to need all of his wits to get out of it.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“A shaft of moonlight illuminated a row of sentinel silver birch in a phosphorescent glow, appearing almost ethereal in the relative surrounding gloom. Boris had stopped again, his silhouette a stark black juxtaposition against the background of illuminated branches.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“Today I plan to smile a lot, only so people who know me will be freaked the fuck out.”
― R.D. Ronald

“Around the outside of the room other beautiful women wearing little or nothing at all flitted between the infatuated, intoxicated men, sometimes luring them away for a private dance. The men would follow obediently, weighed down by lust and credit cards.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“The craggy lines that made up the character in his face now seemed like scars of defeat, inflicted on him over time.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“When you think about it, Johnny Appleseed was a fucking ecological terrorist.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“For the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

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

“By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“There is a Western phenomenon called the male midlife crisis. Very often it is heralded by divorce. What history might have done to you, you bring about on purpose: separation from woman and child. Don’t tell me that such men aren’t tasting the ancient flavors of death and defeat.

In America, with divorce achieved, the midlifer can expect to be more recreational, more discretionary. He can almost design the sort of crisis he is going to have: motorbike, teenage girlfriend, vegetarianism, jogging, sports car, mature boyfriend, cocaine, crash diet, powerboat, new baby, religion, hair transplant.

Over here, now, there’s no angling around for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“As regards structure, comedy has come a long way since Shakespeare, who in his festive conclusions could pair off any old shit and any old fudge-brained slag (see Claudio and Hero in Much Ado) and get away with it. But the final kiss no longer symbolizes anything and well-oiled nuptials have ceased to be a plausible image of desire. That kiss is now the beginning of the comic action, not the end that promises another beginning from which the audience is prepared to exclude itself. All right? We have got into the habit of going further and further beyond the happy-ever-more promise: relationships in decay, aftermaths, but with everyone being told a thing or two about themselves, busy learning from their mistakes. So, in the following phase, with the obstructive elements out of the way (DeForest, Gloria) and the consummation in sight, the comic action would have been due to end, happily. But who is going to believe that any more?”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

“If you can fight, you don’t have to fight. And you don’t have to cower. And girls like that, whatever they say.”
― Martin Amis, Yellow Dog

“Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul—it showed you who you really were.
The wizard couldn’t look at it without turning away. The king couldn’t look at it. The courtiers couldn’t look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could.”
― Martin Amis

“as sure as death and as inescapable as taxes”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“You think just knowing about death will keep you from dying?”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“How many you or I have outlasted doesn't matter, I think. There comes a time when the will just runs out. Doesn't matter what I think, see?”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“He watched his feet, the only things that were keeping him from finding out if there really was a Kingdom of Heaven or not.”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“...it was complicated, she wasn't thinking only of herself but me too, since we'd both been through so many of the same things, she and I, and we were an awful lot alike-too much. And because we'd both been hurt so badly, so early on, in violent and irremediable ways that most people didn't, and couldn't, understand, wasn't it a bit… precarious? A matter of self-preservation? Two rickety and death-driven persons who would need to lean on each other quite so much? not to say she wasn't doing well at the moment, because she was, but all that could change in a flash with either of us, couldn't it? the reversal, the sharp downward slide, and wasn't that the danger? since our flaws and weaknesses were so much the same, and one of us could bring the other down way too quick? and though this was left to float in the air a bit, I realized instantly, and with some considerable astonishment, what she was getting at. (Dumb of me not to have seen it earlier, after all the injuries, the crushed leg, the multiple surgeries; adorable drag in the voice, adorable drag in the step, the arm-hugging and the pallor, the scarves and sweaters and multiple layers of clothes, slow drowsy smile: she herself, the dreamy childhood her, was sublimity and disaster, the morphine lollipop I'd chased for all those years.)”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“The center of my earth is you”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“You could study the connections for years and never work it out-it was all about things coming together,things falling apart,time warp, my mother standing out in front of the museum when time flickered and the light went funny, uncertainties hovering on the edge of a vast brightness. the stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History