Kermit Voit > Kermit's Quotes

“Trick-cyclist or assuager of discontents, whatever his title, the psychiatrist had now passed into history, joining the necromancers, sorcerers and other practitioners of the black sciences. The Mental Freedom legislation enacted ten years earlier by the ultraconservative UW government had banned the profession outright and enshrined the individual’s freedom to be insane if he wanted to, provided he paid the full civil consequences for any infringements of the law. That was the catch, the hidden object of the MF laws. What had begun as a popular reaction against ‘subliminal living’ and the uncontrolled extension of techniques of mass manipulation for political and economic ends had quickly developed into a systematic attack on the psychological sciences. Over-permissive courts of law with their condoning of delinquency, pseudo-enlightened penal reformers, ‘Victims of society’, the psychologist and his patient all came under fierce attack. Discharging their self-hate and anxiety onto a convenient scapegoat, the new rulers, and the great majority electing them, outlawed all forms of psychic control, from the innocent market survey to lobotomy. The mentally ill were on their own, spared pity and consideration, made to pay to the hilt for their failings. The sacred cow of the community was the psychotic, free to wander where he wanted, drooling on the doorsteps, sleeping on sidewalks, and woe betide anyone who tried to help him.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

“We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“Everywhere the air had become a vibrant yellow drum. A heavy sunlight freighted the foliage of the trees. Each leaf was a shutter about to swing back and reveal a miniature sun, one window in the immense advent calendar of nature.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass-merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the pre-empting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen.”
― J. G. Ballard

“Miriam - I'll give you any flowers you want!' Rhapsodising over the thousand scents of her body, I exclaimed: 'I'll grow orchids from your hands, roses from your breasts. You can have magnolias in your hair...!'
'And in my heart?'
'In your womb I'll set a fly-trap!”
― J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company

“On the plane leaving Tokyo I’m sitting alone in back twisting the knobs on Etch-A-Sketch and Roger is next to me singing “Over the Rainbow” straight into my ear, things changing, falling apart, fading, another year, a few more moves, a hard person who doesn’t give a fuck, a boredom so monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by people you don’t even know that it requires you to lose any sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever matching them. Roger offers me a joint and I take a drag and stare out the window and I relax for a moment when the lights of Tokyo, which I never realized is an island, vanish from view but this feeling only lasts a moment because Roger is telling me that other lights in other cities, in other countries, on other planets, are coming into view soon.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, The Informers

“Do you wear a diaphragm everywhere you go?' I want to scream, but stop myself because the idea really excites me.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction

“There is music playing somewhere but I can't hear it.”
― Bret Easton Ellis

“I am a ghost to this man, I’m thinking. I am something unreal, something not quite tangible, yet still an obstacle of sorts and he nods, gets back on the phone, resumes speaking in a dialect totally alien to me.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time — so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I blinked at her. My shades were down and the hall was dark and to me, half-drugged and reeling, she seemed not at all her bright unattainable self but rather a hazy and ineffably tender apparition, all slender wrists and shadows and disordered hair, the Camilla who resided, dim and lovely, in the gloomy boudoir of my dreams.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Cubitum eamus?"
"What?"
"Nothing.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“[Describing the soap in the gulag] It smelt as if some sacred physical law had been demeaned in its creation.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“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

“Why couldn't Rachel be a little more specific about the type of person she was? Goodness knew; if she were a hippie I'd talk to her about her drug experiences, the zodiac, tarot cards. If she were left-wing I'd look miserable, hate Greece, and eat baked beans straight from the tin. If she were the sporty type I'd play her at... chess and backgammon and things.”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

“With Jason I thought I'd finally played my cards right, and now I'm just one more of those
broken, sad people out there, figuring out a year in advance where they can have Easter and
Christmas dinner without feeling like a burden or duty to others, cursing the quality of modern
movies because it's so hard to fill weeknights with movies when they're all crap, and waiting, just
waiting, for those three drinks a night to turn into four - and then, well, then I'll be applying my
makeup in the morning, combing my hair, washing my clothes, but it's not really for anyone. I'm
alive, but so what.”
― Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!

“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

“What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.”
― Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!

“I tiger can smile
A snake will say it loves you
Lies make us evil”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

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

“There's an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“You had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“You have to give up! you have to give up!
You have to realize that someday you will die,
Until you know that, you are useless!”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

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

“At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.”
― Albert Camus

“There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“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

“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

“Well well well. What makes, bratty. What gives, this fine bright
middle of the nochy?" He said:
"I'll give you just ten seconds to wipe that stupid grin off of your
face. Then I want you to listen."
"Well, what?" I said, smecking. "Are you not satisfied with beating me
near to death and having me spat upon and making me confess to crimes for
hours on end and then shoving me among bezoomnies and vonny perverts in that
grahzny cell? Have you some new torture for me, you bratchny?"
"It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll
torture you to madness."
And then, before he told me, I knew what it was. The old ptitsa who had
all the kots and koshkas had passed on to a better world in one of the city
hospitals. I'd cracked her a bit too hard, like. Well, well, that was
everything. I thought of all those kots and koshkas mewling for moloko and
getting none, not any more from their starry forella of a mistress. That was
everything. I'd done the lot, now and me still only fifteen.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange