Yen Buchta > Yen's Quotes

“The guard looked down at the scarlet bloodstains blooming on his chest. He appeared to think of something that he needed to say, but as his lips began to form the words, his knees gave up the strain of supporting his ruined bulk. He collapsed to the floor, his throat issuing a final sound like a bubbling casserole.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“You cannot!' Tatiana said sharply. 'If you order a gun there is only a single shot, and once delivered the doors are locked and will not open until it has been fired.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“Fair enough, that's what most people look for to begin with, but money can be a sliding scale, the more you have, the more you want, the more you need,' McBlane said as he sharpened the ash on the tip of his cigar into a point against the rim of the ashtray. It gave him the appearance of wielding a dagger as he gestured with his cigar holding hand.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“Blood began to flow, at first cautiously, as if embarrassed by its appearance; a few thin red lines exploring the gravitational trajectory of its new terrain. Now it flowed faster, steadily staining her pale flesh a horrific red.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“Веет дремотой и покоем, и тебе уютно, как большому сонному коту, обвившемуся хвостом.”
― Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

“Lady, that soft skin, Your bones and mine Will all be dust Before another mountain’s raised. No oceans, Not a river, Hardly a stream Will dry Before our eyes do, And our hearts. – But should I love you less, For such ephemerality? – I think the more instead. For our love’s in the real world; Profane and carnal, at times banal, But in our human sight, sublime. No greater, but quite different To dying suns and levelled range compared We share from our two separate selves A happenstance understanding, An unfateful fate, Designed by, decreed by nothing, Ungiven, not granted, But ours the more for that, The thing no thing can ever learn, The first and final lesson: Mortality is a quality of life. (January–February 1979)”
― Iain Banks, Poems

“To the people who insist they really do have a great idea but they just can't write, I'd say that given some of the books I've read, or at least started to read, it would appear that not being able to write is absolutely no obstacle whatsoever to writing a book and securing a publishing contract. Though becoming famous in some other field first may help.”
― Iain Banks, Raw Spirit

“... as fur sneak nuclear attacks on anithir country, there was only wan state in history had ever done that, an it wiznae the fuckin Soviet Union.' - McCann”
― Iain Banks, Espedair Street

“But he hadn’t done something wrong, I suggested. He had saved innocent lives and helped defeat those who would bring society down. “It was still against the law!” he shouted. “Don’t you see? If the law means anything then I couldn’t be above it. Not just because I was a police officer or because my breaking it had resulted in some lives being saved. That’s not the point. Torture was illegal. I’d broken the law. Can’t you see any of this?” He shook his the chair, rattling the chains attaching his handcuffs to the floor. “It’s even more important to prosecute police who’ve broken the law than it is to prosecute anybody else, because otherwise nobody trusts the police.” I pointed out that the forceful questioning of suspects was now entirely if unfortunately legal, even if it hadn’t been then. “‘Forceful questioning.’ You mean torture.”
― Iain Banks, Transition

“Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief.”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

“She didn't use the misery of others to cultivate her own smugness, true, but at least I didn't go about eating all their food.”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

“It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don't think that's true—unless it isn't true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward—shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It's a mess in there.”
― Martin Amis, Night Train

“Character is destiny”
― Martin Amis, London Fields

“A surge ay euphoria comes ower me as ah clock that nippy wee cockney cunt, Nicksy; he's on the baw, giein it loads, mouthing off, so ah steam in wi a dirty two-fitted tackle on him. 'Take that, ya English bastard!”
― Irvine Welsh, Skagboys

“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

“Ma best mate is possibly Tommy. Cares aboot things, aboot people; maybe just a wee bit too much for the kind ay world we're compelled tae live in.”
― Irvine Welsh, Skagboys

“but ah'm hugging Janey and thinking about how much a life can change in the time it takes tae fix up.”
― Irvine Welsh, Skagboys

“Edinburgh could be bleak, but Aberdeen really took the pish. A life could be wasted waiting for the sky tae change fae grey tae blue.”
― Irvine Welsh, Skagboys

“Any cunt withoot the virus could git run ower the morn. That’s the wey ye huv tae look at it. Cannae jist cancel the gig. The show must go oan.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“What do you do?' she asks, holding out the vest.
'What do you do?'
'What do you do?' she asks, her voice shaking. 'Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?'
'Why not?'
She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams.
'Because... I don't know,' she sighs.
I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“Sometimes when you’re standing in a crowd I feel those sultry dark eyes of yours stop on me. Are you too afraid to come up to me and let me know how you feel I want to moan and writhe with you and I want to go up to you and kiss your mouth and pull you to me and say “I love you I love you I love you” while stripping. I want you so bad it stings.”
― Bret Easton Ellis

“ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Piece and Piece and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“This isn't a script," Julian says. "It's not going to add up. Not everything's going to come together in the third act.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms

“It was if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn't take her back–not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days. And that was tough, as Hely would say. Tough: since back was the way she wanted to go, since the past was the only place she wanted to be.”
― Donna Tartt, The Little Friend

“The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook (a mathematical progression of dating, "career," marriage, and motherhood), did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest of them all was Sherlock Holmes, and he wasn’t even a real person. Then there was Harry Houdini. He was the master of the impossible; more importantly, for Harriet, he was a master of escape. No prison in the world could hold him: he escaped from straitjackets, from locked trunks dropped in fast rivers and from coffins buried six feet underground.

And how had he done it? He wasn’t afraid. Saint Joan had galloped out with the angels on her side but Houdini had mastered fear on his own. No divine aid for him; he’d taught himself the hard way how to beat back panic, the horror of suffocation and drowning and dark. Handcuffed in a locked trunk in the bottom of a river, he squandered not a heartbeat on being afraid, never buckled to the terror of the chains and the dark and the icy water; if he became lightheaded, for even a moment, if he fumbled at the breathless labor before him– somersaulting along a river-bed, head over heels– he would never come up from the water alive.

A training program. This was Houdini’s secret.”
― Donna Tartt, The Little Friend

“I accepted all this counsel politely, with a glassy smile and a glaring sense of unreality. Many adults seemed to interpret this numbness as a positive sign; I remember particularly Mr. Beeman (an overly clipped Brit in a dumb tweed motoring cap, whom despite his solicitude I had come to hate, irrationally, as an agent of my mother’s death) complimenting me on my maturity and informing me that I seemed to be “coping awfully well.” And maybe I was coping awfully well, I don’t know. Certainly I wasn’t howling aloud or punching my fist through windows or doing any of the things I imagined people might do who felt as I did. But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Greatness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“I was eighteen now, just gone. Eighteen was not a young age. At eighteen old Wolfgang Amadeus had written concertos and symphonies and operas and oratorios and all that cal, no, not cal, heavenly music. And then there was old Felix M. with his "Midsummer Night's Dream" Overture. And there were others. And there was this like French poet set by old Benjy Britt, who had done all his best poetry by the age of fifteen, O my brothers. Arthur, his first name. Eighteen was not all that young an age then. But what was I going to do?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Yes yes yes, there it was. Youth must go, ah yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.
My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry forella surrounded with mewing kots and koshkas, and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on until like the end of the world, round and round and round, like some bolshy gigantic like chelloveck, like old Bog Himself (by courtesy of Korova Milkbar) turning and turning and turning a vonny grahzny orange in his gigantic rookers.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange