Alberta Secor > Alberta's Quotes

“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

“So this is how cunts that never shag fuckin well live. A life oy impotence, resentment, anger and frustration; nae fuckin exuberance in life, forced tae become an Internet troll or a miserable drunk in a boozer.”
― Irvine Welsh, A Decent Ride

“Me abraza con fuerza, pero no hay amor ni ternura. Sólo desesperación. Quizá tenga que ver con la conciencia de que me estoy alejando de él, alejándome de este mundo que él quiere que habite: su mundo, el mundo que no compartimos.”
― Irvine Welsh, Ecstasy

“Love is a fake!” Olson was blaring. “There are three great truths in the world and they are a good meal, a good screw, and a good shit, and that’s all!”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing. And you can quote me.”
― Richard Bachman

“Ain’t none of you ever been stuck in the mud and needed a push? I won’t ask you how you can be for this and still call yourselves Christians, because one of you would have some kind of answer out of what I call the Holy-Joe-Do-It-My-Way Bible. But, Jeezly-Crow! How can you read the parable of the Good Samaritan on Sunday and then say you’re for a thing like this on Monday night?”
― Richard Bachman, Blaze

“Literature is the great garden that is always there and is open to everyone 24 hours a day. Who tends it? The old tour guides and sylviculturists, the wardens, the fuming parkies in their sweat-soaked serge: these have died off. If you do see an official, a professional, these days, then he's likely to be a scowl in a labcoat, come to flatten a forest or decapitate a peak. The public wanders, with its oohs and ahs, its groans and jeers, its million opinions. The wanderers feed the animals, they walk on the grass, they step in the flowerbeds. But the garden never suffers. It is, of course, Eden; it is unfallen and needs no care.”
― Martin Amis

“Senza mai guardare dove sta andando, la gente si muove attraverso qualcosa di predisposto, armata di bugie. Non vede l'ora di raggiungere luoghi dai quali è appena tornata, o si rammarica di aver fatto cose che non ha ancora fatto. Signori delle bugie e della spazzatura - di ogni sorta di merda e di spazzatura.

[...]

Lo prendiamo ancora in culo ogni mattina come tutti gli altri - ma in questi giorni la cosa finisce in un baleno.”
― Martin Amis, Time's Arrow

“Take a look at the scaly witches round your local shopping center, many of them with children. Grim enough with their clothes on. Imagine them naked! Snatches that yo-yo between their knees, breasts so flaccid you could tie them in a knot. One would have to be literally galvanized on Spanish Fly even to consider it. Yet it gets done somehow. Look at the kids. — The teenager may be more spontaneous, doglike, etc., but it’s generally only another name on the list, only another notch on the cock.”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

“He laughed. “What’s to say? Great paintings—people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they’re reproduced endlessly on coffee mugs and mouse pads and anything-you-like. And, I count myself in the following, you can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But—” crossing back to the table to sit again “—if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you.” Fingertip gliding over the faded-out photo—the conservator’s touch, a touch-without-touching, a communion wafer’s space between the surface and his forefinger.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I'd unboxed so much china from funeral sales and broken-up households that there was something almost unspeakably sad about the pristine, gleaming displays, with their tacit assurance that shiny new tableware promised an equally shiny and tragedy-free future.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“The idea of living there, of not having to go back ever again to asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture; of living there with Charles and Camilla and Henry and Francis and maybe even Bunny; of no one marrying or going home or getting a job in a town a thousand miles away or doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college; of everything remaining exactly as it was, that instant - the idea was so truly heavenly that I'm not sure I thought, even then, it could ever really happen, but I like to believe I did.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Matters progressed.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I was sick of wanting money. I was sick of being without a goal.”
― Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!

“At least there's nothing scary about him and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go way back, to summer camp. We KNOW each other. People I don't know just make me want to say YIKES! I'll take history over mystery any day of the week.”
― Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet

“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

“Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Anybody who thinks that 'it doesn't matter who's President' has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid war on the other side of the world--or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property--or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons--or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Don't judge your taco by its price”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel-white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“Writing is the flip side of sex - it's only good when it's over.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“It's a library; only the stupid and the evil are afraid of those”
― Iain Banks

“As a writer, you get to play, you get to alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you'd thought of.”
― Iain Banks

“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

“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

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box

“There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater