Freeman Machain > Freeman's Quotes

“We're going forward, but nothing changes.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.”
― Douglas Coupland

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?” he said. “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, ‘more like deer than human being.’ To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“People who go to the Opera, they don't go to the toilet, not even at home.”
― Martin Amis, Money

“My life has been the polar opposite of safe, but I am proud of it and so is my son, and that is good enough for me. I would do it all over again without changing the beat, although I have never recommended it to others. That would be cruel and irresponsible and wrong, I think, and I am none of those things.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

“It was one of those moments where you saved me, you made me laugh at just the right time.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Because whatever I hear outside, cars scrunching down the narrow, council-house streets, sometimes sweeping their headlights across this fusty old room, drunks challenging or serenading the world, or the rending shrieks of cats taking their torturous pleasures, I know I won't hear that noise.”
― Irvine Welsh, Skagboys

“Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life - not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horrors of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. Consider our most real and tender pleasures - in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. What our children have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow, but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“Scott's mind was racing, struggling to comprehend the events unfolding around him. They were talking about disposing of Twinkle like he was a rusty old bike that no-one rode anymore.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Dan thought of love as defined by books, cobwebbed and hidden from view by the past. Too bad a love like that didn't actually exist. In the twentieth century one had to fake it.”
― Dennis Cooper, Closer

“You called it right, Megumi. A lot of us will play..And play to win. No sense playing otherwise,hmm.”
― Koushun Takami, Battle Royale, Vol. 01

“There is no language without deceit.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Everyone knew the urge to run from the world; few dared do it.”
― Ian McEwan, The Children Act

“If I learned anything about her it was that she lived with a vehemence most of us never have the courage for." Banks tells me. "But there was something about her that precluded an ordinary existence. In some ways, I'm not surprised she's dead. A job, husband, kids, a beach house? That wasn't her. I can't explain why, except she was more like a force that whipped through life, defying logic, scaring you, even hurting you because she was everything you wanted to be, but you knew you'd never have the guts - and then she was gone. That was my experience with Ashley Cordova.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

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

“Do you know why they call me the Count? Because I love to count! Ah-hah-hah!
- The Count Sesame Street”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“Horrorshow is right, friend. A real show of horrors.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“I walked far down a dirt side road and into a farmer's field - some sort of cereal that was chest high and corn green and rustled as its blades inflicted small paper burns on my skin as I walked through them. And in that field, when the appointed hour, minute, and second of the darkness came, I lay myself down on the ground, surrounded by the tall pithy grain stalks and the faint sound of insects, and held my breath, there experiencing a mood that I have never really been able to shake completely - a mood of darkness and inevitability and facination - a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers-laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. "That's Life." That's what they all said. "That's Life, Harriet, that's just how it is, you'll see.”
― Donna Tartt, The Little Friend

“Bigfoot was interviewed on The Patty Winters Show this morning and to my shock I found him surprisingly articulate and charming.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“You won't find reasonable men on the tops of tall mountains.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Let you alone! That’s all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
'But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks.
'The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,' Marco answers, 'but by the line of the arch that they form.'
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: 'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.'
Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas?
Are you my Angel?”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“Emphasis and implication are complementary techniques. The first bullies the audience into acceptance; the second entices it into mental collaboration; the first forces the offer down the consumer's throat; the second tantalizes, to whet his appetite.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”
― Franz Kafka

“My true intent is all for your delight.”
― Nick Cave, The Death of Bunny Munro