Wilbur Cotten > Wilbur's Quotes

“May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than us – have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Before I leave, the Eurotrash girl tells me she likes my gazelleskin wallet. I tell her I would like to tit-fuck her and then maybe cut her arms off, but the music, George Michael singing “Faith,” is too loud and she can’t hear me. Back upstairs I find Patricia where I left her,”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“The highways are crowded with people who drive as if their sole purpose in getting behind the wheel is to avenge every wrong done them by man, beast or fate. The only thing that keeps them in line is their fear of death, jail and lawsuits.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Still, failure, success, what is it? Whae gies a fuck. We aw live, then we die, in quite a short space ay time n аw. That's it; end ay fuckin story.”
― Irvine Welsh

“I don't "lol". I tried it once but it just didn't agree with me.”
― R.D. Ronald

“There's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“They got that way, Garraty had noticed. Complete withdrawal from everything and everyone around them. Everything but the road. They stared at the road with a kind of horrid fascination, as if it were a tightrope they had to walk over an endless, bottomless chasm”
― Richard Bachman

“If Edgar sounded overeager, even rushed, the race was with his own temperament. He placed a premium on savvy. Yet since you could only obtain new information by admitting you didn’t know it already, savvy required an apprenticeship as a naive twit. You had to ask crude, obvious questions…you had to sit still while worldly-wise warhorses…fired withering glances as if you were born yesterday.


Well, Edgar was born yesterday for the moment, although his tolerance for being treated liked a simpleton was in short supply. He’d needed to rattle off a multitude of stupid questions before he embraced his next incarnation as an insider. The trouble was that savvy coated your brain in plastic like a driver’s license: nothing more could get in. Hence the point at which you decided you knew everything was exactly the point at which you became an ignorant dipshit.”
― Lionel Shriver, The New Republic

“...and he just sat back and stared at the tube, almost interested in what was happening, trying to find the ability to believe in that lie so he could believe the one within.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

“Io sono vivo, voi siete morti”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik

“I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee

“It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I am born anew at each green fall of the die, and by die-ing I eliminate my since. The past - paste, pus, piss - is all only illusory events created by a stone mask to justify an illusory stagnant present.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. . . . No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you.
Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn’t vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today—and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever.
Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?
They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us—they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.
And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

“Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“I've got to get this stuff out of my system. No, more than that, much more. I've got to get my system out of my system. That's what I've got to do.”
― Martin Amis, Money

“But what does it mean, the plague? It's life, that's all.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Craziness is only a matter of degree, and there are lots of people besides me who have the urge to roll heads. They go to stock-car races and the horror movies and the wrestling matches they have in Portland Expo. Maybe what she said smacked of all those things, but I admired her for saying out loud, all the same--the price of honesty is always high. She had an admirable grasp of the fundamentals. Besides, she was tiny and pretty.”
― Richard Bachman, Rage

“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

“If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Actually I do know. Now ask me if I care.”
― Koushun Takami, Battle Royale, Vol. 03

“One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“My attorney rubbed his hand across his mustache and the corners of his lips several times, as though the allegation was a piece of cake he’d just eaten that had deposited crumbs all over his mouth.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We’re back where we started. To you, nothing – from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason, other than that I value it so much.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“Cafe Owners are more frustrated than the common laborer," Draeger writes. "The common laborer answers only to the foreman; the cafe owner answers to every patron who stops in”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their marriage.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“The deep sea breaking miles away on the reef made an undertone less perceptible than the susurration of the blood.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies