Garry Petrain > Garry's Quotes

“Kev shuddered. This was crazy, but there it was; his name, spelt by an insect...
— Boab? Is that really you? Fuckin hell! Eh, buzz twice fir aye, once fir naw.
Two buzzes.
— Did eh, what's his name, did God dae this?
Two buzzes.
— Whit the fuck ur ye gaunny dae?
Frantic buzzing.
— Sorry Boab... kin ah git ye anything? Scran, likesay?”
― Irvine Welsh, The Acid House

“Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.”
― Albert Camus

“He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. 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

“Which one hadn't he walked down? Was it Barkovitch? Collie Parker? Percy What'shisname? Who was it? 'GARRATY!' the crowd screamed deliriously. 'GARRATY, GARRATY, GARRATY!'
Was it Scramm? Gribble? Davidson? A hand on his shoulder. Garraty shook it off impatiently. The dark figure beckoned, beckoned in the rain, beckoned for him to come and walk, to come and play the game. And it was time to get started. There was still so far to walk.”
― Stephen King as Richard Bachman

“If your world is out there and you are in here then the only things that will gather within these walls are time and bitterness. Eventually, that bitterness will eat away at you and leave nothing behind but resentment and hate.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)”
― Martin Amis, Money

“I pretend to understand because I don't want anybody to be hurt”
― Charles Bukowski, Hollywood

“Well, it’s amazing what you can find in this world if you’re willing to sleep with people.”
― Douglas Coupland, Eleanor Rigby

“We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity, as though America and gravity weren't there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them. This was the way I felt about the tunnels. They weren't news to anybody else, but they made such an impression on me that I felt I'd conjured them into being.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Understand yourself, accept yourself, but do not be yourself.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“Samuel: What's a misanthrope?
Two Bob: A misanthrope is a bugger who hates every other bugger.
Samuel: Are we misanthropes?
Arthur: Lord no! We're family. ”
― Nick Cave

“When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control all of it.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“Non badavo granché a tematiche o felicità di stile, e saltavo le descrizioni minute di tempo atmosferico, paesaggi e interni. Volevo personaggi in cui potessi credere, e volevo provare curiosità per ciò che avrebbero vissuto. […] Romanzi a sensazione, alta letteratura e tutto ciò che stava nel mezzo: a ognuno riservavo lo stesso rude trattamento.”
― Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“In lots of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He’ll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can’t figure out whether the hero’s laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff—a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I’m not lazy, whatever else I am. I’ll tell you everything.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“What remains uncertain, rather, is whether this gain in evidence and (we might as well say it) splendor is due to the slow retreat of the sky, which as it moves away, sinks deeper and deeper into darkness, or whether on the contrary, it is the moon that is coming forward, collecting the previously scattered light and depriving the sky of it, concentrating it all in the round mouth of its funnel.”
― Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus

“I watch these kids.
They don't seem entirely unhappy. A few times I've even circled the Free Clinic on foot, trying to catch a closer glimpse of these kids and their lives as they pop in and out of the clinic's Sputnik-era, gone-to-seed building--Lancaster's future trolls and Popeyes loitering out back having hushed paranoid conversations. And once I even went to have a look where they hang out in a big way, out in the delivery bay behind the now-closed Donut Hut, the delivery bay grotto out back with a floor spongy with pigeon shit, chewing gum, cigarette ashes, and throat oysters--dank and sunless. I went to visit this place once when all the druggies were away, having their druggy lives downtown doing their druggy things: yelling at parked cars and having conversations with amber lights. I visited this place and I was confused: confused and attracted. Who do these people think they are? How can they not care about the future or hot running water or clean sheets or cable TV? These people. And on the walls down at the delivery bay, do you know what they had written? Written in letters several hands high, letters built of IV needles attached to the cement with soiled bandages and wads of chewing gum? They had written the words WE LIKE IT.”
― Douglas Coupland

“Sie würden ihm helfen, ihn heilen. Arzneien und Ärzte. Eine Änderung der Einstellung.
Dann Frieden.
Seine Streitsüchtigkeit würde wie Unkraut aus ihm herausgejätet werden.”
― Richard Bachman, The Running Man

“Scott could feel the contents of his stomach flip over and over on themselves. He turned to the side and retched, frothy yellow bile spilled out onto the newspaper covered floor, filling the room with the putrid stench of previously ingested alcohol.

'Look's like someone can't hold their drink,' McBlane said, and Dominic and Shugg laughed.

Scott was still staring at the steam rising from his evacuated stomach contents as he heard the hammer fall. The dull crack of bone splintering under its weight.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“Speak up for me, sir, for I'm not so bad. I was led on by the treachery of others.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.”
― Martin Amis, Money

“To me she looks like a big black ant - a big black ant in an original Christian Lacroix - eating a urinal cake and I almost start laughing, but I also want to keep her at ease. I don't want her to get second thoughts about finishing the urinal cake. But she can't eat any more and with only two bites taken, pretending to be full, she pushes the tainted plate away, and at this moment I start feeling strange. Even though I marveled at her eating that thing, it also makes me sad and suddenly I'm reminded that no matter how satisfying it was to see Evelyn eating something I, and countless others, had pissed on, in the end the displeasure it caused her was at my expense - it's an anticlimax, a futile excuse to put up with her for three hours.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“كم من المرات نحتاج لحياة كاملة من أجل تغيير حياتنا، إننا نفكر، ونفكر، ونوازن الإيجابيات والسلبيات، ونتردد، ثم نعود إلى نقطة البداية ونبدأ من جديد في التفكير، والتفكير مرة أخرى، إننا ننتقل على قضبان الزمن في حركة دائرية، مثل زوابع الريح الصغيرة التي تعبر الريف مزرية الغبار وأوراق الشجر الميتة وكل أنواع الأشياء التافهة الصغيرة، نظرًا لقوتها المعتدلة، كان من الأفضل العيش في بلد الأعاصير المدمرة.”
― جوزيه ساراماجو, The Stone Raft

“The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“Itt az ősz, járt a fejemben, itt az ősz. Mintha most először volna itt, fura dolog. Ősz. Még nem is olyan régen tavasz volt, aztán nyár, most meg ősz – fura csakugyan.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll