Darci Fineout > Darci's Quotes

“It is good to remove oneself sometimes and get a sense of perspective from a little further away.”
― Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

“The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what we are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.”
― Iain Banks, Complicity

“The music machine played away - far away - and when I started to understand the lyrics of a Cocteau Twins song, I knew I was wrecked.”
― Iain Banks, The Crow Road

“Readers will recall that the little evidence collected seemed to point to the strange and confusing figure of an unidentified Air Force pilot whose body was washed ashore on a beach near Dieppe three months later. Other traces of his ‘mortal remains’ were found in a number of unexpected places: in a footnote to a paper on some unusual aspects of schizophrenia published thirty years earlier in a since defunct psychiatric journal; in the pilot for an unpurchased TV thriller, ‘Lieutenant 70’; and on the record labels of a pop singer known as The Him — to instance only a few. Whether in fact this man was a returning astronaut suffering from amnesia, the figment of an ill-organized advertising campaign, or, as some have suggested, the second coming of Christ, is anyone’s guess.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“...parking was well on the way to becoming the British population's greatest spiritual need.”
― J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

“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

“In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war.”
― J G Ballard

“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

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

“if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Are you becoming what you've always hated?”
― Charles Bukowski, Hollywood

“Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“I don't understand beauty.”
― Douglas Coupland, Eleanor Rigby

“The belief that tomorrow is a different place from today is certainly a unique hallmark of our species.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“Time, Baby - so much, so much time left until the end of my life - sometimes I go crazy at how slowly time passes yet how quickly my body ages.
But I shouldn't allow myself to think like this. I have to remind myself that time only frightens me when I think of having to spend it alone. Sometimes I scare myself with how many of my thoughts revolve around making me feel better about sleeping alone in a room.”
― Douglas Coupland, Life After God

“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!

“And as the elevator descends, passing the second floor, and the first floor, going even farther down, I realize that the money doesn't matter. That all that does is that I want to see the worst.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“Keep everything young and soft, keep everything on the surface, even with the knowledge that the surface fades and can't be held together forever - take advantage before the expiration date appears in the nearing distance.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms

“What do you want, Patrick?" she sighs.
"I just want peace, love, friendship, understanding," I say dispassionately.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“I looked at it out there. The figures that held my attention, as always (I too had an office at Buna, and spent many hours in front of its window), the figures that held my attention were not the men in stripes, as they queued or scurried in lines or entangled one another in a kind of centipedal scrum, moving at an unnatural speed, like extras in a silent film, moving faster than their strength or build could bear, as if in obedience to a frantic crank swivelled by a furious hand; the figures that held my attention were not the Kapos who screamed at the prisoners, nor the SS noncoms who screamed at the Kapos, nor the overalled company foremen who screamed at the SS noncoms. No. What held my eye were the figures in city business suits, designers, engineers, administrators from IG Farben plants in Frankfurt, Leverkusen, Ludwigshafen, with leather-bound notebooks and retractable yellow measuring tapes, daintily picking their way past the bodies of the wounded, the unconscious, and the dead.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

“And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.”
― Martin Amis, London Fields

“Dove saremmo Tod e io senza il gabinetto? Dove saremmo senza tutta la spazzatura?”
― Martin Amis, Time's Arrow

“But the heart has its own memory and I have forgotten nothing.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“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 is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness. ”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“American humorist Kin Hubbard said , "It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be". The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue... Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

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

“If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke.”
― Kurt Vonnegut