Noel Cotham > Noel's Quotes

“Face it: You're always just a breath away from a job in telemarketing.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“what I remember is the silence in spite of the noise. In my head it
might just as well have been a snowy day in the country.”
― Douglas Coupland

“I ma trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“...most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they're gone for the day - if not the week - and can't be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“Horns sounded from the trapped vehicles on the motorway, a despairing chorus.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us "buying"? Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world.”
― JG Ballard

“The Thames Shouldered its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer the passive stream that slid past Chelsea Marina, but a rush of ugly water that had scented the open sea and was ready to make a run for it.”
― J.G. Ballard, Millennium People

“Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force.”
― J G Ballard

“You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Each man kills the thing he loves”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish.”
― Anthony Burgess, Tremor of Intent

“To turn a decent young man into a piece of clockwork should not, surely, be seen as any triumph for any government, save one that boasts of its repressiveness.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“That's the law, son. But you were never much of a one for following the law.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.”
― 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

“Why do I do anything?' she says. 'I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“That’s pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our attention. Jacking off. Denial.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead.
You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“I'm a toxic waste byproduct of God's creation.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“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

“He turned and saw Becky, crying in the doorway of her house. What was he doing here? Turning back he saw flashing blue lights at the end of the road, and realised the ringing in his ears was the sound of approaching sirens.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“Anyone who says "Trust me" is the last motherfucker you should ever trust.”
― R.D. Ronald

“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

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

“I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.”
― Albert Camus

“Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel