Mao Lindloff > Mao's Quotes

“It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“we left about midnight and walked down the hill in silence. the night was muggy, and all around me i felt the same pressure, a sense of time rushing by while it seemed to be standing still. whenever i thought of time in puerto rico, i was reminded of those old magnetic clocks that hung on the walls of my classrooms in high school. every now and then a hand would not move for several minutes -- and if i watched it long enough, wondering if it had finally broken down, the sudden click of the hand jumping three for four notches would startle me when it came.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“No cop was ever born who isn't a sucker for a finely-executed hi-speed Controlled Drift all the way around one of those clover-leaf freeway interchanges. Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side when he sees the big red light behind him... and then we will start apologizing begging for mercy. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. The thing to dowhen you're running along about a hundred or so and you suddenly find a red-flashing CHP-tracker on your trail what you want to do then is accelerate.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“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

“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'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

“love be damned now
as love was damned when it
first arrived.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“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

“Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you?”
― Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas

“I mean, nobody tells you sex is going to be so _noisy_, do they? ...”
― Iain Banks, The Crow Road

“The belief that we somehow moved on to something else - whether still recognisably ourselves, or quite thoroughly changed - might be a tribute to our evolutionary tenacity and our animal thirst for life, but not to our wisdom. That saw a value beyond itself; in intelligence, knowledge and wit as concepts - wherever and by whoever expressed - not just in its own personal manifestation of those qualities, and so could contemplate its own annihilation with equanimity, and suffer it with grace; it was only a sort of sad selfishness that demanded the continuation of the individual spirit in the vanity and frivolity of a heaven.”
― Iain Banks

“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

“So she's wipin spunk offay her face, gaun aw fuckin panicky, `Whae wis that, wis that ma dad?`

`Fuckin durty pervert sneakin up oan cunts like that,` ah goes.

So she goes aw that fuckin ice-cauld, frigid, huffey wey, but fuck her, ye need a wee bit ay fuckin romance at Christmas.”
― Irvine Welsh, Skagboys

“Schopenhauer was right: Life has to be about disillusionment stumbling inexorably towards the totally fucked.”
― Irvine Welsh, Skagboys

“I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain to be alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.”
― Douglas Coupland, Life After God

“Here are some passing thoughts. Imagine looking up at the moon and seeing it burning.
Imagine seeing the grocery store’s checkout girl grow horns.
Imagine growing younger instead of older.
Imagine feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold.”
― Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

“My mood has changed now. And the sun has gone behind the clouds. I'm in this mood I feel occasionally... this mood where there's a very good friend nearby who I should be phoning. If only I could reach that friend and talk, then everything would be just fine. The dilemma is, of course, I just don't know who that friend is. But in my heart I know my mood is merely me feeling disconnected from my true inner self.”
― Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet

“But then a bumblebee bumbled above us and it stole our attention the way flying things can.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“For the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit. I am a rock. A jerk. I'm an uncaring asshole and proud of it.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.”
― Albert Camus

“Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a 'fiancé,' why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.”
― Albert Camus

“We're going forward, but nothing changes.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“In their eyes I must have appeared like some kind of nightmarish totem, a domestic idiot suffering from the irreversible brain damage of a motorway accident and now put out each morning to view the scene of his own cerebral death.”
― J G Ballard

“They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never dissapointed.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“Beyond the silver span of the motor bridge lay basins of cracked mud the size of ballrooms - models of a state of mind, a curvilinear labyrinth.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned giant was washed ashore on the beach five miles to the north-west of the city.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Complete Short Stories