Lissa Niewieroski > Lissa's Quotes

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

“Jason said, "Yes. Gerard T. Giraffe."
What does the 'T' stand for?"
'The.”
― Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!

“Life is maybe like deep-sea fishing. We wake up in the morning, we cast our nets into the water, an, if we are lucky, at day's end we will have netted one-- maybe two-- small fish. Occasionally we will net a seahorse or sometimes a shark-- or a life preserver or an iceberg, or a monster. And in our dreams at night we assess our Catch of the Day-- the treasures of this long, slow process of accumulation...”
― Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet

“Truth be told, John said, the one thing in this world I want more than anything else is a great big crowbar, to jimmy myself open and take whatever creature that's sitting inside and shake it clean like a rug and then rinse it in a cold, clear lake like up in Oregon, and then I want to put it under the sun to let it heal and dry and grow and sit and come to consciousness again with a clear and quiet mind.”
― Douglas Coupland, Miss Wyoming

“I peer through the spectral, polluted, nicotine-sodden windows of my sock at these old lollopers in their kiddie gear. Go home, I say. Go home, lie down, and eat lots of potatoes. I had three handjobs yesterday. None was easy. Sometimes you really have to buckle down to it, as you do with all forms of exercise. It's simply a question of willpower. Anyone who's got the balls to stand there and tell me that a handjob isn't exercise just doesn't know what he's talking about. I almost had a heart-attack during number three. I take all kinds of other exercise too. I walk up and down the stairs. I climb into cabs and restaurant booths. I hike to the Butcher's Arms and the London Apprentice. I cough a lot. I throw up pretty frequently, which really takes it out of you. I sneeze, and hit the tub and the can. I get in and out of bed, often several times a day.”
― Martin Amis, Money

“The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning, and the same ending.”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“Denunciation in Russia has a long history, going back at least as far as the sixteenth century and the testingly protracted reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533– 84). “Spy or die” was, more or less, the oath you swore. This practice, increasingly institutionalized under the old regime, was a tsarist barbarity that Lenin might have been expected to question.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“When you're in love and trying to make someone love you back, you can hear the texture of your own footfalls, the whistling passage of your breath. Invisible eyes monitor you constantly: even at night something presides over the shape of your sleep. Every thought carries a tick or a cross.”
― Martin Amis, Other People

“Einstein's Monsters," by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now.”
― Martin Amis, Einstein's Monsters

“Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time’s arrow moves the other way.”
― Martin Amis, Time's Arrow

“Ser bueno puede llegar a ser algo horrible.”
― anthony burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish.”
― Anthony Burgess, Tremor of Intent

“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”
― Anthony Burgess

“We have annexed the future into our present as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us”
― J.G. Ballard

“Now and then, the slight lateral movement of the building in the surrounding airstream sent a warning ripple across the flat surface of the water, as if in its pelagic deeps an immense creature was stirring in its sleep.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“The dead were buried above ground, the loose soil heaped around them. The heavy rains of the monsoon months softened the mounds, so that they formed outlines of the bodies within them, as if this small cemetery beside the military airfield were doing its best to resurrect a few of the millions who had died in the war. Here and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts.”
― J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun

“Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“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

“Nothing in life is worth,
turning your back on,
if you love it.”
― Albert Camus

“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

“... her taste in music haunted my memory and I had to stop at Tower Records on the Upper West Side to buy ninety dollars' worth of rap CDs but, as expected, I'm at a loss: [...] voices uttering ugly words like digit, pudding, chunk.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Her need is so immense that you become surrounded by it; this need is so enormous that you realize you can actually control it, and I know this because I've done it before.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms

“No,” I start, hesitantly. “Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. Ensure a strong national defense, prevent the spread of communism in Central America, work for a Middle East peace settlement, prevent U.S. military involvement overseas. We have to ensure that America is a respected world power. Now that’s not to belittle our domestic problems, which are equally important, if not more. Better and more affordable long-term care for the elderly, control and find a cure for the AIDS epidemic, clean up environmental damage from toxic waste and pollution, improve the quality of primary and secondary education, strengthen laws to crack down on crime and illegal drugs. We also have to ensure that college education is affordable for the middle class and protect Social Security for senior citizens plus conserve natural resources and wilderness areas and reduce the influence of political action committees.” The table stares at me uncomfortably, even Stash, but I’m on a roll.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Will you call me before Christmas?' she asks.
Maybe.' I pull on my vest, wondering why I even came here in the first place.
You've still got my number, don't you?' She reaches for a pad and begins to write it down.
Yeah, Blair. I've got your number. I'll get in touch.'
I button up my jeans and turn to leave.
Clay?'
Yeah, Blair.'
If I don't see you before Christmas,' she stops. 'Have a good one.'
I look at her a moment. 'Hey, you too.'
She picks up the stuffed black cat and strokes its head.
I step out the door and start to close it.
Clay?' she whispers loudly.
I stop but don't turn around.'Yeah?'
Nothing.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“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

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“He wandered into the Newsroom and asked for a job the same way he’d walk into a barbershop and ask for a haircut, and with no more idea of being turned down.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“it seemed that young people, despite their fundamental decency, now had to buy into a mind-set which made viciousness and treachery come easy.”
― Irvine Welsh

“Still, failure, success, what is it? Whae gies a fuck. We aw live, then we die, in quite a short space ay time n аw. That's it; end ay fuckin story.”
― Irvine Welsh