David Billow
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David Billow

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The Underground R...
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John Kennedy Toole
“Perhaps I should have been a Negro. I suspect I would have been a rather large and terrifying one, continually pressing my ample thigh against the withered thighs of old white ladies in public conveyances a great deal and eliciting more than one shriek of panic. Then, too, if I were a Negro, I would not be pressured by my mother to find a good job, for no good jobs would be available. My mother herself, a worn old Negress, would be too broken by years of underpaid labor as a domestic to go out bowling at night. She and I could live most pleasantly in some moldy shack in the slums in a state of ambitionless peace, realizing contentedly that we were unwanted, that striving was meaningless.”
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

James Ellroy
“Epidemic boo-hoo — ‘DON’T TELL MY WIFE!’ Leg-shackle clangs — the prostie vans shook…Panic down below: Shriners bagged en masse. Five men, fez hats flying — a whore grabbed one and pranced.”
James Ellroy, White Jazz

Elliott Chaze
“You've never heard a siren until you've heard one looking for you and you alone. Then you really hear it and know what it is and understand that the man who invented it was no man, but a fiend from hell who patched together sounds and blends of sounds in a way that could paralyze and sicken. . . . But when it is after you, it is the texture of the whole world. You will hear it until you die.”
Elliott Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel

Charles Bukowski
“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.”
Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

Michael Chabon
“Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined desert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man. They clumped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head down on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls-Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe’s frock coat and trousers. It would require the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason through the arguments against and in favor of classifying the rebbe’s massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a man-made structure, or an unavoidable act of God.”
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

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