Stanley Thorp > Stanley's Quotes

“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“You hate America, don't you?'

That would be as silly as loving it,' I said. 'It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“I can't tell if you're serious or not,' said the driver.
I won't know myself until I find out if life is serious or not,' said Trout. 'It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.... It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Everything about life is a joke. Don't you know that?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

“It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80's

“I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“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

“Paranoia is just another mask for ignorance. The truth, when you finally chase it down is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“There have been rich meat and bloody wine. There have been brandies, and thick puddings. There has already been some dirty talk. Selina is in high spirits, and as for me, I'm a gurgling wizard of calorific excess.”
― Martin Amis, Money

“Q: What’s the difference between a Communist car and a Communist proselytizer? A: You can close the door on a Communist proselytizer.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“[Describing the soap in the gulag] It smelt as if some sacred physical law had been demeaned in its creation.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing towards me over the uneven ground.”
― Martin Amis, Time's Arrow

“Life always wins.”
― Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet

“How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we knit together this place we call the world? Without stories our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It's a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation A

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

“It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.”
― Albert Camus

“I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.”
― Albert Camus

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

“Badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“What sort of world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there's not no attention paid to earthly law nor order no more.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted was a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it. Let us have evil prancing on the page... up to the very last line... Such a book would be sensational, and so it is. But I do not think it is it fair picture of human life. I do not think so because, by definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange-meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil... It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice... Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“I wish I had the courage not to fight and doubt everything... I wish, just once, I could say, 'This. This is good enough. Just because I choose it.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“I'm a toxic waste byproduct of God's creation.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“The future is just wasted on some people.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“It began as a mistake.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“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

“Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.”
― Charles Bukowski