Peter Giner > Peter's Quotes

“Yeah,' I said and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.”
― Martin Amis

“Now they were all moving to no effect-just moving, just switching things off and switching things on, just picking things up and putting things down and picking things up and stroking the cat and counting the mugs and fighting for air. It seemed that everything they did had already been done and done, and that everything they thought had already been thought and thought, and that this would never end. Excuse me said panic to each of them in turn. They had no mouth and they had to scream.”
― Martin Amis

“Marriage is always something of a compromise, as I'm sure you're now aware. Any long-term relationship is - and one does have to see it in the long term, Charles. No, I expect your mother and myself will never divorce. It's uneconomic and, at my age, usually unnecessary.”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

“It must make you feel nice and young to say that being a man means nothing and being a woman means nothing and what matters is being a...person. How about being a spider, Gwyn. Let's imagine you're a spider. You're a spider, and you've just had your first serious date. You're limping away from that now, and you're looking over your shoulder, and there's your girlfriend, eating one of your legs like a chicken drumstick. What would you say? I know. You'd say: I find I never think in terms of male spiders or in terms of female spiders. I find I always think in terms of...spiders”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“He could take one look at me- at the ashtray, the bottle, the four pots of coffee, my face, and my gut set like a stone on the white band of the towel- he could take one look at me and be pretty sure i ran on heavy fuel.”
― Martin Amis, Money

“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

“People don't love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realised that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“One needs a great deal of idle time to feel really sorry for oneself.”
― J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights

“Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse …”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“Nothing endures for so long as fear. Everywhere in nature one sees evidence of innate releasing mechanisms literally millions of years old, which have lain dormant through thousands of generations but retained their power undiminished. The field-rat’s inherited image of the hawk’s silhouette is the classic example—even a paper silhouette drawn across a cage sends it rushing frantically for cover. And how else can you explain the universal but completely groundless loathing of the spider, only one species of which has ever been known to sting? Or the equally surprising—in view of their comparative rarity—hatred of snakes and reptiles? Simply because we all carry within us a submerged memory of the time when the giant spiders were lethal, and when the reptiles were the planet’s dominant life form.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World

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

“If you are going to try, go all the way or don't even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski

“maybe a damned good night's sleep will bring me back to a gentle sanity.
But at the moment, I look about this room and, like myself, it's all in disarray: things fallen out of place, cluttered, jumbled, lost, knocked over and I can't put it straight, don't
want to.

Perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready for the dangerous ones.”
― Charles Bukowski

“We'd be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“I blew the horn a few times, hoping to call up an iguana. Get the buggers moving. They were out there, I knew, in that goddamn sea of cactus--hunkered down, barely breathing, and every one of the stinking little bastards was loaded with deadly poison.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel-white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“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

“My arm draped her shoulder; we both felt safe, as if we were a complete solar system unto ourselves, dangling in the sky, warm heated planets inside a universe of stars.
-Richard”
― Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma

“Well, it’s amazing what you can find in this world if you’re willing to sleep with people.”
― Douglas Coupland, Eleanor Rigby

“Once he entered my life, I promptly forgot all my years of putting on a brave face while browsing
at bookstores until closing time, and of having one, two, three beers while watching crime shows
and CNN. I completely forgot the hateful sensation of loneliness, like thirst and hunger together
pressing on my stomach.”
― Douglas Coupland

“Post-adolescent Expert Syndrome
The tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die with pleasure on the battlefield. Also the reason why religions recruit kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers almost exclusively from the 18-21 range. "Kyle, I never would have guessed that when you were up in your bedroom playing World of Warcraft all through your teens, you were, in fact, becoming an expert on the films of Jean-Luc Godard.”
― Douglas Coupland, Player One: What Is to Become of Us

“Anyway, I want to remember that love can happen. Because there is life after not having a life. I never expected love to happen. What was I expecting from life, then?”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

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

“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

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

“We had not spoken about the incident in my room several nights before and, in the drowsy silence of the car, I felt the need to make things plain.
“You know, Francis,” I said.
“What?”
It seemed the best thing was just to come right out and say it. “You know,” I said, “I’m really not attracted to you. I mean, not that—”
“Isn’t that interesting,” he said coolly. “I’m really not attracted to you, either.”
“But—”
“You were there.”
We drove the rest of the way to school in a not very comfortable silence.”
― Donna Tartt