Leon Feldker > Leon's Quotes

“Self improvement is masturbation...”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.

I would have done anything to feel real again.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“McVries opened his eyes and smiled again.
The next instant
He was gone.”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.” “Well said,” said Julian. “Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Since he was sixteen, he had been continuously sexually active, either with a girlfriend or through a series of casual flings. From the point of someone like Kibby, he considered, he would be regarded as highly succesful with women.

But the real problem is relationships, which fucking social retards like Kibby can't grasp, because they're just so obsessed with getting their hole.”
― Irvine Welsh, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

“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

“What? No. We can't stop here. This is bat country.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“It wasn’t so much that I thought there was nowhere to go, in this huge city; but with so many places to go, where were you supposed to begin?”
― Kelly Braffet, Fabulous Things: A Slightly Twisted Love Story

“أننا غير مضطرين لإخبار الناس عن مصائبنا”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.”
― Henry Miller

“Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee--
Respite--respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quothe the Raven, "Nevermore.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

“Naked Mr. America, burning frantic with self bone love, screams out: "My asshole confounds the Louvre! I fart ambrosia and shit pure gold turds! My cock spurts soft diamonds in the morning sunlight!”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“Yes, I'm going to die with him. I'm going to die for the sake of Hiroki's love for me and my foolishness.”
― Koushun Takami, Battle Royale

“. . . finally, I couldn't imagine how I could live without books, and I stopped dreaming about marrying that Chinese prince. . . .”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“There were not so many physical threats that could not be countered with a decent hammer.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire

“Boulevards are like people: similar in their youth, they undergo gradual change according to what ferments in them.”
― M. Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

“It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one's children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to them as explicit, difficult people, and that can consequently keep you devoted to them when as individuals they disappoint. On my part it was this broad covenant with children-in-theory that I may have failed to make and to which I was unable to resort when Kevin finally tested my maternal ties to a perfect mathematical limit on Thursday. I didn't vote for parties, but for candidates. My opinions were as ecumenical as my larder, then still chock full of salsa verde from Mexico City, anchovies from Barcelona, lime leaves from Bangkok. I had no problem with abortion but abhorred capital punishment, which I suppose meant that I embraced the sanctity of life only in grown-ups. My environmental habits were capricious; I'd place a brick in our toilet tank, but after submitting to dozens of spit-in-the-air showers with derisory European water pressure, I would bask under a deluge of scalding water for half an hour. My closet wafter with Indian saris, Ghanaian wraparounds, and Vietnamese au dais. My vocabulary was peppered with imports -- gemutlich, scusa, hugge, mzungu. I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and obscenely specific.

By the same token, I could not love a child; I would have to love this one. I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the United States so much more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity. Although neither of us ever went to church, I came to conclude that you were a naturally religious person.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“If no God, there must at least be a pattern-making demiurge.”
― Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist's Handbook