Keith Palese > Keith's Quotes

“We must learn how to lend ourselves to dreaming when dreams lend themselves to us.”
― Albert Camus

“It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“He dropped the phone back onto its cradle, began to turn around and felt a sudden ice-cold furrow open up in his side. Strength drained from his legs, and a moment later he sank to his knees. There was warmth now that ran over the initial and persistent cold.

Mohammed was confused, and barely noticed the briefcase being removed from his grip. He heard the click of a cell phone opening, and a soft beeping as a number was dialed.

'The package is in my possession,' a female voice said, and the phone clicked shut.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“Work dominates life in Eden-Olympia, and drives out everything else. The dream of a leisure society was the great twentieth-century delusion. Work is the new leisure. Talented and ambitious people work harder than they have ever done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfillment through work. The men and women running successful companies need to focus their energies on the task in front of them, and for every minute of the day. The last thing they want is recreation.”
― J G Ballard

“But I couldn’t. It was real; I knew it, even in the dark. Raised yellow streak of paint on the wing and feathers scratched in with the butt of the brush. One chip on the upper left edge that hadn’t been there before, tiny mar less than two millimeters, but otherwise: perfect. I was different, but it wasn’t. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I want to watch it again tonight even though I know I won't have enough time to masturbate over the scene where the woman is getting drilled to death by a power drill since I have a date with Courtney at seven-thirty at Cafe Luxembourg.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“she is no longer
the beautiful woman
she was. she sends
photos of herself
sitting upon a rock
by the ocean
alone and damned.
I could have had
her once. I wonder
if she thinks I
could have
saved her?”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“and i can't stand the idea of being alone.
i can't bear the thought of being free.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“Do you know how when people are really hungry they will be driven to eat the inedible? Grass and soil and the like? That also happens with love. If you want love badly enough, you will start gobbling harmful substitutes like attention and possessions.”
― Alissa Nutting, Made for Love

“You spend a long time waiting for life to start – her past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant – and then it does start and you realise it isn’t what you’d expected, or asked for.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“Living apart and at peace with myself,I came to realize more vividly the meaning of the doctrine of acceptance. To refrain from giving advice, to refrain from meddling in the affairs of others, to refrain even though the motives be the highest, from tampering with anothers way of life-so simple, yet so difficult for an active spirit. Hands Off.”
― Henry Miller

“In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“He spoke so slowly, cobwebs could have formed between his words.”
― Scott Heim, Mysterious Skin

“No forgiveness for lies.”
― Ryū Murakami, Audition

“The sky is purple, the flare of a match behind a cupped hand is gold; the liquor is green, bright green, made from a thousand herbs, made from altars. Those who know enough to drink Chartreuse at Mardi Gras are lucky, because the distilled essence of the town burns in their bellies. Chartreuse glows in the dark, and if you drink enough of it, your eyes will turn bright green.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls

“Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction, and sentimentality are good excuses.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“Юность не вечна, о да. И потом, в юности ты всего лишь вроде как животное, что ли. Нет, даже не животное, а скорее какая-нибудь игрушка, что продаются на каждом углу, – вроде как жестяной человечек с пружиной внутри, которого ключиком снаружи заведешь – др-др-др, и он пошел вроде как сам по себе, бллин. Но ходит он только по прямой и на всякие vestshi натыкается – бац, бац, к тому же если уж он пошел, то остановиться ни за что не может. В юности каждый из нас похож на такую malennkuju заводную shtutshku.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“But you don't need anything. You have everything,' I tell him.
Rip looks at me. 'No I don't.'
'What?'
'No I don't.'
There's a pause and then I ask, 'Oh, shit, Rip, What don't you have?'
'I don't have anything to loose.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“We have to live and let live in order to create what we are.”
― Albert Camus

“Around the outside of the room other beautiful women wearing little or nothing at all flitted between the infatuated, intoxicated men, sometimes luring them away for a private dance. The men would follow obediently, weighed down by lust and credit cards.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“... if yir gaunny git hung fir stealin a sheep ye might as well shag it n aw.”
― Irvine Welsh, The Acid House

“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

“Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles spreading up through her arm as she read her way through Richardson's Clarissa.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Without a future, the present serves no purpose,”
― José Saramago, Blindness