Wilson Witry > Wilson's Quotes

“God, what did any of it matter, in the end? You lived; you died. You were as indistinguishable from a distance as one of these blades of grass, and who was to say more important? Growing, surrounded by your kin, you out-living some, some out-living you. You didn't have to adjust the scale much, either, to reduce us to the sort of distant irrelevance of this bedraggled field. The grass was lucky if it grew, was shone upon and rained upon, and was not burned, and was not pulled up by the roots, or poisoned, or buried when the ground was turned over, and some bits just happened to be on a line that humans wanted to walk on, and so got trampled, broken, pressed flat, with no malice; just effect.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road

“She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger than Fiction

“We can no longer create the feeling of an era...of time being particular to one spot in time.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.
Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“Football divisions were a stupid and irrelevant nonsense, acting against the interest of working-class unity, ensuring that the bourgeoisie's hegemony went unchallenged.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“Ne marche pas devant moi, je ne suivrai peut-être pas. Ne marche pas derrière moi, je ne te guiderai peut-être pas. Marche juste à côté de moi et sois mon ami.”
― Albert Camus / آلبر کامو

“It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye, entire years for all I know. . . . Mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it's not at all. Time is something which defies spring and water, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible. Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no 'I,' and yet it's not at all like those horrid comparisons one sometimes hears in Eastern religions, the self being a drop of water swallowed by the ocean of the universe. It's more as if the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self. You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem, after such an ecstasy.”
― Donna Tartt

“I want to convey a mood, and what you are reading is a constituent of how you feel. In biographies they should always tell us that, routinely, in the margin: what they were reading. What”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“Are you going to deliver whatever threat Avari sent you with, or are we going to have to start guessing?" Tod said. "I gotta warn you, I'm insanely good at charades.”
― Rachel Vincent, Before I Wake

“Do you have a driver's license?"

He laughed. "That's important?"

"Oh yeah! I'd kill for a driver's license! Hey, maybe that's what the poem means! I'm going to go berserk and start attacking people because they won't let me drive..."

"Could be, you never know. But yes, I have a driver's license."

I leaned back against the wall, sighing. "Man, that must be so cool."

"It ranks right up there with lockers. In fact, sometimes I put my drivers license inside my locker, and it's so cool I worry that the whole thing might explode with the sheer coolness of it all.”
― Kiersten White, Paranormalcy

“Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom.
–The Grand Inquisitor”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“this morning I go to pay for breakfast and there, right there at the Kroger check-out, staring me in the face is a national magazine with your picture on the cover. Counterfeit Countess, it said. In great big, bold type: Counterfeit! Countess! Counterfeit,” he reiterated, “a word interchangeable with forgery and often associated with arrest.” Ah, yes. Patrice had called from Austin and warned me she had sold the story to Woman’s World magazine. “Last sentence?” Mittwede asked. “You know what it is?’ “No, I’ve not seen it.” “Tanya says, ‘I’m going to grow up and be a con artist.’” It had struck me as pretty funny when I said it, but Mittwede had better delivery. I think it was the hysteria. He was saying, “I remember that story. That was like a year and a half ago. You didn’t tell me you were that girl, the Dallas Countess. I already knew the story but I read it again, and I know all the cops have read it again, too. And now your picture is with Passport Services and at the check-out counter. You think federal agents don’t buy groceries? You’re fucking crazy. We’re going to be arrested.” “You maybe need to take a Valium.” “I threw them all in the fire!”   ~~~~~~”
― Tanya Thompson, Assuming Names: a con artist's masquerade

“– C’est ce receveur, expliqua le conducteur.
– Ah ! dit Amadis.
– Il aime pas les voyageurs. Alors, il s’arrange pour
qu’on parte sans voyageur et il ne sonne jamais. Je le sais
bien.
– C’est vrai, dit Amadis.
– Il est fou, vous comprenez, dit le machiniste.
– C’est ça… murmura Amadis. Je le trouvais bizarre.
– Ils sont tous fous à la Compagnie.
– Ça ne m’étonne pas !
– Moi, dit le conducteur, je les possède. Au pays des
aveugles, les borgnes sont rois. Vous avez un couteau ?
– J’ai un canif.
– Prêtez.”
― Boris Vian, Autumn in Peking

“Darkness there, and nothing more.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

“homesickness is just a state of mind for me. i'm always missing someone or someplace or something, i'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. my life has been one long longing.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Well, anyway, by the time it got ready to vote, it looked like a fella wouldn’t be able to have no fun at all anymore, if my opponents were elected. About all a fella would be able to do, without getting arrested, was to drink sody-pop and maybe kiss his wife. And no one liked the idea very much, the wives included.”
― Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280

“It's only because I refused to tear those spattered maps from the study for years, or to allow you to paint over them as you were so anxious to, that Kevin "remembers" the incident at all. He was, as you observed repeatedly at the time, awfully young.
'I kept them p for my sanity,' I said. 'I needed to see something you'd done to me, to reach out and touch it. To prove that your malice wasn't all in my head.'
'Yeah,' he said, tickling the scar on his arm again. 'Know what you mean.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“A person's life story is equal to what they have plus what they want most in the world, minus what they're actually willing to sacrifice for it.”
― Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist's Handbook