Edith Hershenson > Edith's Quotes

“You have no cause to grumble boy. You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice. Whatever now ensues is what you yourself have chosen.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“C.S. Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way.”
― Anthony Burgess

“Have you by chance brought some real British tea? Twining’s? Or from Jackson’s in Piccadilly?”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

“I felt a strange tightness coming over me, and I reacted instinctively – for the first time in a long, long while – by slipping my notebook into my belt and reaching down to take off my watch. The first thing to go in a street fight is your watch, and once you’ve lost a few, you develop a certain instinct that lets you know when it’s time to get the thing off your wrist and into a safe pocket.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

“When the Pentagon feels free and even gleeful about killing anybody and Everybody who gets in the way of their vicious crusade for oil, the public soul of this country has changed forever, and professional sports is only a serenade for the death of the American dream. Mahalo.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness: Modern History from the ESPN.com Sports Desk

“It began as a mistake.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide.
I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

“Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“His mind raced through past horrors experienced first hand and from the accounts of others. He mentally flipped through a grim database which contained everything from vegan flatmates to psychotic pimps.”
― Irvine Welsh

“His mind was like a cruel prison, giving his captive soul a sight of freedom, but no more”
― Irvine Welsh

“In Scotland we've been exporting every straight cunt tae Canada fir generations. Result? They're boring fuckers, and we're a drug-addled underclass.”
― Irvine Welsh, Skagboys

“Increasingly, life seems fractured, as if his past had been lived by someone else. It isn't just that the place he now resides in and the people around him are poles apart, it's like he himself is an entirely different person. The overriding obsessions and foibles of the man he'd once been now feel utterly ludicrous to the current resident of his mind and body. The only bridge is rage; when angered he can taste his old self. But in California, the way he is currently living his life, few things can vex him to that extent. But that's over there.”
― Irvine Welsh, The Blade Artist

“Just been poisoned by my gran. Nothing says Christmas better than familicide and anaphylactic shock.”
― R.D. Ronald

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

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

“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

“Ne marche pas devant moi, je ne suivrai peut-être pas. Ne marche pas derrière moi, je ne te guiderai peut-être pas. Marche juste à côté de moi et sois mon ami.”
― Albert Camus / آلبر کامو

“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

“It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.”
― Albert Camus

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

“So sind die Dinge manchmal. Wenn alles am schlimmsten ist, dann wirft der Verstand alles in einen Papierkorb und geht für eine Weile nach Florida. Da ist ein Was-zur-Hölle-soll's?-Gefühl in einem, während man da-steht und über die Schulter zu der Brücke zurückblickt, die man soeben niedergebrannt hat.”
― Richard Bachman, Rage

“I thought maybe you'd wish for friends because you don't have any. We'll all be glad to see you die. No one's going to miss you, Gary. Maybe I'll walk behind you and spit on your brains after they blow them all over the road. Maybe I'll do that. Maybe we all will." - Garraty (to Barkovitch), The Long Walk”
― Richard Bachman

“Do you know why they call me the Count? Because I love to count! Ah-hah-hah!
- The Count Sesame Street”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“having stormed the German nuclear base in Santiago nearly single-handed back in 1953.”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“„Eindeutige Tatsachen sind, wie immer, Verhandlungssache – das lernte man schnell im Anwaltsberuf”
― Richard Bachmann

“All the way down the creek, perched in the windows of the office blocks and department stores, the iguanas watched them go past, their hard frozen heads jerking stiffly… Without the reptiles, the lagoons and the creeks of office blocks half-submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dream-like beauty, but the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-time board-rooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World

“Consumerism is the one thing that gives us our sense of values. Consumerism is honest, and teaches us that everything good has a barcode.”
― J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

“The crystal trees among them were hung with glass-like trellises of moss. The air was markedly cooler, as if everything was sheathed in ice, but a ceaseless play of light poured through the canopy overhead. The process of crystallization was more advanced. The fences along the road were so encrusted that they formed a continuous palisade, a white frost at least six inches thick on either side of the palings. The few houses between the trees glistened like wedding cakes, white roofs and chimneys transformed into exotic miniarets and baroque domes. On a law of green glass spurs, a child’s tricycle gleamed like a Faberge gem, the wheels starred into brilliant jasper crowns.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Crystal World

“It was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch