Ali

“The future was always there; you couldn't get away from a thing like that. Nobody could. But it was a way of seeing it that terrified him, a glimpse he only got when he wasn't expecting it, like turning a corner on the right street and having the city line itself up perfectly, all the way to the river. It wasn't like the river went anywhere, George told me. It never got up and walked off or dried up when you weren't looking. It was just that most days you didn't worry about it. But then you'd see it, and you'd worry; and this future, too, was something that tempted you, that asked you to cast yourself into it and drown. And then you'd turn, George said, and when you looked back it'd be gone. You'd have escaped once more.”
― Patrick Nathan, The Future Was Color

“I was wrong. I knew I was wrong, and yet I persisted. If that is possible of any explanation it is this: From the day I left my father my lines had been cast, or I cast them myself, among crooked people. I had not spent one hour in the company of an honest person. I had lived in an atmosphere of larceny, theft, crime. I thought in terms of theft. Houses were built to be burglarized, citizens were to be robbed, police to be avoided and hated, stool pigeons to be chastised, and thieves to be cultivated and protected. That was my code; the code of my companions. That was the atmosphere I breathed. 'If you live with wolves, you will learn to howl.”
― Jack Black, You Can't Win

“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“I develop oddly deep emotional connections to people in my life that are one-sided. I may just be a passing character to them. I don't know what that is. I don't know why that is. I can have one encounter with somebody and feel very connected to them and read a lot into that. They become very important people to me, but to them I may just be like, "Oh yeah, we talked that one time, right?" To me it's a live-changing moment that bonded us; to them, it was a five-minute polite chat in passing.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal