Teresa > Teresa's Quotes

“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

“EXPLOSIVE IN MY COAT POCKET—THE VARIETY THEY CALL BLACK IRISH. TWELVE POUNDS IS ENOUGH TO TAKE OUT EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE WITHIN A THIRD OF A MILE AND PROBABLY ENOUGH TO EXPLODE THE JETPORT FUEL STORAGE TANKS. IF YOU DON’T FOLLOW MY INSTRUCTIONS”
― Richard Bachman, The Running Man

“The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing. And you can quote me.”
― Richard Bachman

“-Atención -decía Bobby Thompson-. Éste es uno de los lobos que camina entre ustedes.”
― Richard Bachman, The Running Man

“It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing,” he said. “You are like children. Afraid of the dark.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Side by side they were very much alike, in similarity less of lineament than of manner and bearing, a correspondence of gestures which bounced and echoed between them so that a blink seemed to reverberate, moments later, in a twitch of the other's eyelid.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him. If you stepped back far enough, however, the illusion would click in again and there he would be, bigger than life, squinting at you from behind his little glasses and raking back a dank lock of hair with one hand.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“How were you supposed to explain this kind of thing? It seemed stupid to try. Even the memory was starting to seem vague and starry with unreality, like a dream where the details get fainter the harder you try to grasp them. What mattered more was the feeling, a rich sweet undertow so commanding that in class, on the school bus, lying in bed trying to think of something safe or pleasant, some environment or configuration where my chest wasn't tight with anxiety, all I had to do was sink into the blood-warm current and let myself spin away to the secret place where everything was all right.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“I drink much less than most people think, and I think much more than most people would believe.”
― Hunter S Thompson, Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good-humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are..These occasions are rare, but they happen — despite the forked tongue of fate that has put us forever on different paths...”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

“—Everybody talks about being a writer, angel. If every novel conceived on a bar stool made it into print, there would not be one tree left standing on God’s green Earth.”
― Irvine Welsh, The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins: A Novel

“Schopenhauer was right: Life has to be about disillusionment stumbling inexorably towards the totally fucked.”
― Irvine Welsh, Skagboys

“Ah sortay jist laugh whin some cats say that racism's an English thing and we're aw Jock Tamson's bairn up here . . . it's likesay pure shite man, gadges talkin through their erses.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“She’s so fucking beautiful it don’t bear thinking about. I could hardly keep my eyes on the fucking road. I sort of felt like I was wasting time whenever I wasn’t looking at her face.”
― Irvine Welsh, Ecstasy

“Не можех да кажа на Лизи за купона в Бъроуленд. Направо никакъв шанс. Щом взех "пенсията", веднага купих билета. Останах без пукната пара. Този ден обаче тя имаше рожден ден. Трябваше да избирам: или билета, или подарък за нея. Никакъв шанс. Ставаше дума за Иги Поп. Мислех, че ще ме разбере.
- Значи можеш да си купиш шибан билет за скапания Иги Поп, а не можеш да се прежалиш за подарък!
Е това е Лизи с реторичните си въпроси - гадното оръжие на гаджетата и психарите.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“Her mum thought gourmet cooking was putting a load of fish fingers under the grill instead of in the frying pan.”
― Irvine Welsh

“But now it seems clear that literary criticism was inherently doomed. Explicitly or otherwise it had based itself on a structure of echelons and hierarchies; it was about the talent elite. And the structure atomized as soon as the forces of democratization gave their next concerted push.

Those forces – incomparably the most potent in our culture – have gone on pushing. And they are now running up against a natural barrier. Some citadels, true, have proved stormable. You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdathon; a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go.

Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth’s poetics; it will come from a challenging study of his politics – his attitude toward the poor, say, or his unconscious ‘valorization’ of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped. A brief consultation of the Internet will show that meanwhile, everyone has become a literary critic – or at least, a book-reviewer.”
― Martin Amis (Author), The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000

“At the age of twenty, his artistic dreams frustrated, Hitler was a tramp: park benches, soup queues. Given just a little more talent, perhaps, he would have killed himself, not in the bunker, but in a cosy little studio in Klagenfurt.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“As for me, I'm a gurgling wizard of calorific excess.”
― Martin Amis

“The militant Utopian, the perfectibilizer, from the outset, is in a malevolent rage at the obvious fact of human imperfectibility.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Standing in the nordic nook of the kitchen, I can gaze down at the flimsy-limbed joggers heading south towards the Park. It's nearly as bad as New York. Some of these gasping fatsos, these too-little-too-late artists, they look as though they're running up rising ground, climbing ground. My generation, we started all this. Before, everyone was presumably content to feel like death the whole time. Now they want to feel terrific for ever.”
― Martin Amis, Money

“...with the flat smile of the deeply inconvenienced.”
― Martin Amis

“Веет дремотой и покоем, и тебе уютно, как большому сонному коту, обвившемуся хвостом.”
― 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

“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

“Blame Lewis.”
― Iain Banks, The Crow Road

“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

“What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“OK, now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.

Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.

A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.

But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.

When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this:
“You are not enough people!”

I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who has six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family.

They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome.

Wouldn't you have loved to be that baby?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian