Everything I've copied out of a book — filed by word, not by author.
"You've got some blow?" she says. "Is Stevie Wonder blind?" you say. She takes your arm and leads you into the Ladies'. A couple of spoons and she seems to like you just fine, and you are feeling very likable yourself. A couple more. This woman is all nose. "I love drugs," she says, as you march toward the bar. "It's something we have in common," you say. "Have you ever noticed how all the good words start with D? D and L." You try to think about this. You're not quite sure what she's driving at. The Bolivians are singing their marching song, but you can't make out the words. "You know. Drugs. Delight. Decadence." "Debauchery," you say, catching the tune now. "Dexedrine." "Delectable. Deranged. Debilitated." "Delinquent." "Delirium." "And L," she says. "Lush and luscious." "Languorous." "Librium." "Libidinous." "What's that?" she says. "Horny." "Oh," she says, casting a long, arching look over your shoulder. Her eyes glaze in a way that reminds you precisely of the closing of a sandblasted glass shower door. You can see that the game is over, although you're not sure which rule you broke. Possibly she finds H words offensive. A purist. She is scanning the dance floor for a man with a compatible vocabulary. You have more: detumescence, for instance. Drowning and depressed; lost and lonesome. It's not that you're really going to miss this girl who thinks that decadence and Dexedrine are the high points of the language of Kings James and Lear. But the touch of flesh, the sound of another human voice ... You know there is a special purgatory waiting for you out there in the dawn's surly light, a desperate half sleep which is like a grease fire in the brainpan. The girl waves as she disappears into the crowd. There is no sign of the other girl, the girl who would not be here. There is no sign of Tad Allagash. The Bolivians are mutinous. You can't stop their treacherous voices.Jay McInerney — Bright Lights, Big City
with the sunshine bright and the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you've been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.Robert Penn Warren — All The King's Men
the hoe will lift again and the blade will flash in the sun like a heliograph.Robert Penn Warren — All The King's Men
Go west young man, ain’t you been told? California’s full of whiskey, women, and gold…Joan Didion — Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there’s other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.Cormac McCarthy — Blood Meridian
That I was given help through dreams, especially how to avoid spitting blood and bouts of dizziness: and the response of the oracle at Caieta, ‘Just as you use yourself’.Marcus Aurelius — Meditations
In the morning they crossed a bed of thunderstones clustered on that heath like the ossified eggs of some primal groundbird.Cormac McCarthy — Blood Meridian
First, – Canst thou by searching find out God? Yes because, in the first place, I know I did not make myself, and yet I have existence; and by searching into the nature of other things, I find that no other thing could make itself.Thomas Paine — The Age of Reason
It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention; it is only the application of them that is human. Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed.Thomas Paine — The Age of Reason
Go to! God hath deposited cash in the Bank subject to our gentlemanly order: he hath bounteously blessed the world with a summer carpet of green. Begone, Heraclitus! The lamentations of the rain are but to make us our rainbows!Herman Melville — Pierre
He bent over his grammar in the light of the oil lamp. The straw roof hissing in the bellshaped dark above him and his shadow on the roughtroweled wall. Like those scholars of old in their cold stone rooms toiling at their scrolls. The lenses of their lamps that were made of tortoiseshell boiled and scraped and formed in a press and the fortuitous geographies they cast upon the tower walls of lands unknown alike to men or to their gods.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
Howard Roark built a temple to the human spirit. He saw man as strong, proud, clean, wise and fearless. He saw man as a heroic being. And he built a temple to that. A temple is a place where man is to experience exaltation. He thought that exaltation comes from the consciousness of being guiltless, of seeing the truth and achieving it, of living up to one’s highest possibility, of knowing no shame and having no cause for shame, of being able to stand naked in full sunlight. He thought that exaltation means joy and that joy is man’s birthright. He thought that a place built as a setting for man is a sacred place. That is what Howard Roark thought of man and of exaltation.Ayn Rand — The Fountainhead
Never shall I get down the vile inventory! How, if with paper and with pencil I went out into the starry night to inventorize the heavens? Who shall tell stars as teaspoons? Who shall put down the charms of her upon paper?Herman Melville — Pierre
And in keeping with Japhy’s habit of always getting down on one knee and delivering a little prayer to the camp we left, to the one in the Sierra, and the others in Marin, and the little prayer of gratitude he had delivered to Sean’s shack the day he sailed away, as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and knelt on the trail and said “Thank you, shack.” Then I added “Blah,” with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.Jack Kerouac — The Dharma Bums
But what is your life? Can you see it? It vanishes at its own appearance. Moment by moment. Until it vanishes to appear no more. When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered? How are they separate?Cormac McCarthy — Cities of the Plain
We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar. I could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turning in their beds. "These are dark and evil days," the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear. Years passed. My mother wore a cat-fur collar which she stroked until its sparks lit up the cellar.Charles Simic — The World Doesn’t End
STEVENS: And you worked, and lived, and rose to success together ever since? KAREN: For ten years. When we made our first million kroner, he took me to Vienna. We sat in a restaurant where the orchestra played “Sing, Gypsy.” When we made ten million, he took me to Delhi. We stood on the shore of the Ganges, on the steps of an old temple where human slaves had been sacrificed to gods . . . When we made twenty-five million, he took me to New York. We hired a pilot to fly a plane above the city — and the wind waved Bjorn’s hair as a banner over the world at his feet.Ayn Rand — Night of January 16th
The more that works of art excel in true beauty of presentation, the more profound is the inner truth of their content and thought.G.W.F. Hegel — Lectures on Aesthetics
A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.Raymond Chandler — The High Window
Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand.Walt Whitman — Leaves of Grass
"Jesus!" Trent yells, sitting up, grabbing the telephone and screaming into it, "I don't even want your lousy, fucking coke!" He pauses for a moment and then says, “Yeah, I'll be right down." He hangs the phone up and looks at me. "Who was it?" "My mother. She's calling from downstairs." We walk downstairs. The maid's sitting in the living room, with this dazed look on her face, watching MTV. Trent tells me that she doesn't like to clean the house when anybody's home. "She's always stoned anyway."Bret Easton Ellis — Less Than Zero
It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.Hunter S. Thompson — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Her black-gloved hand reached out and I put the bills in it. She bent over to count them under the dim light of the dash. A bag clicked open, clicked shut. She let a spent breath die on her lips. She leaned towards me. "I'm leaving, copper. I'm on my way. This is a getaway stake and God how I need it."Raymond Chandler — The Big Sleep
The immappable world of our journey. A pass in the mountains. A bloodstained stone. The marks of steel upon it. Names carved in the corrosible lime among stone fishes and ancient shells. Things dimmed and dimming. The dry sea floor. The tools of migrant hunters. The dreams encased upon the blades of them. The peregrine bones of a prophet. The silence. The gradual extinction of rain. The coming of night.Cormac McCarthy — Cities of the Plain
“You’ve got some blow?” she says. “Is Stevie Wonder blind?” you say. She takes your arm and leads you into the Ladies’. A couple of spoons and she seems to like you just fine, and you are feeling very likable yourself. “I love drugs,” she says, as you march toward the bar. “It’s something we have in common,” you say. “Have you ever noticed how all the good words start with D? D and L.” “You know. Drugs. Delight. Decadence.” “Debauchery,” you say, catching the tune now. “Dexedrine.” “Delectable. Deranged. Debilitated.” “Delinquent.” “Delirium.” “And L,” she says. “Lush and luscious.” “Languorous.” “Librium.” “Libidinous.” “What’s that?” she says. “Horny.” She is scanning the dance floor for a man with a compatible vocabulary. But the touch of flesh, the sound of another human voice … You know there is a special purgatory waiting for you out there in the dawn’s surly light, a desperate half sleep which is like a grease fire in the brainpan.Jay McInerney — Bright Lights, Big City
Ah, if man were wholly made in heaven, why catch we hell-glimpses? Why in the noblest marble pillar that stands beneath the all-comprising vault, ever should we descry the sinister vein? We lie in nature very close to God, and though, further on, the stream may be corrupted by the banks it flows through, yet at the fountain's rim, where mankind stand, there the stream infallibly bespeaks the fountain.Herman Melville — Pierre
Yes, it’s true: but I have seen houses in Bel-Air with cool lawns and green swimming pools. I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed.John Fante — Ask the Dust
Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commoners; bear me out in it, O God!Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and Vallejo it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorably about bombing power stations.Joan Didion — The White Album
"I have heard," murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, "that in violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip, in this strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there?"Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
The campfire was built in front of a tent and the tent was under an enormous pine. When you slept inside the tent it seemed always that it was raining outside because the needles from the pine kept falling. Sitting across from him and staring into the fire was his father. Each summer they came to this place which was nine thousand feet high and covered with pine trees and dotted with lakes. They fished in the lakes and when they slept at night the roar of water from the streams which connected the lakes sounded in their ears all night long.Dalton Trumbo — Johnny Got His Gun
Each man is the bard of his own existence. This is how he is joined to the world. For escaping from the world's dream of him this is at once his penalty and his reward. Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty. All in our custody seethes with an inner restlessness. But in dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet.Cormac McCarthy — The Crossing
The registration read: Carmen Sternwood, 3765 Alta Brea Crescent, West Hollywood. I went back to my car again and sat and sat. The top dripped on my knees and my stomach burned from the whiskey. No more cars came up the hill. No lights went on in the house before which I was parked. It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.Raymond Chandler — The Big Sleep
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby
I went to bed full of whiskey and frustration and dreamed about a man in a bloody Chinese coat who chased a naked girl with long jade earrings while I ran after them and tried to take a photograph with an empty camera.Raymond Chandler — The Big Sleep
I kissed her tightly and quickly. Then a long slow clinging kiss. Her lips opened under mine. Her body began to shake in my arms. "Killer," she said softly.Raymond Chandler — The Big Sleep
When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty until her mother came into the space with a broad homey smile on her face to watch me drive away. I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.Raymond Chandler — The High Window
Her bosom was heaving. Go ahead. She leaned and kissed him and stepped away and then the archatron came forward with his sword and raised it in his two hands above him and clove the traveler's head from his body.Cormac McCarthy — Stella Maris
You married? No sir. I aint but sixteen. Dont get married. Women are crazy. Yessir. You’ll think you’ve found one that aint but guess what? What? She will be too.Cormac McCarthy — The Crossing
Maybe he was afraid that he too would become one of these grown people whose faces were blank and lonely, and he too would have to satisfy himself with a house in the neighborhood and one of the girls from high school and a job at one or another factory and just sit there and die of it. So he ran for the only frontier he ever heard about and became a cowboy.Don Carpenter — Hard Rain Falling
Funny weed, them flycatchers. Lots of funny plants. Them Indians eat a outfit called a wapatoo, a tuber-like affair that grows under water in the sloughs, squaws wade around barefoot and grub them outen the mud with their toes.Ken Kesey — Sometimes a Great Notion
What will you say if I give you the answer people usually give me — that love is forgiveness? I’ll say it’s indecency of which you’re not capable — even though you think you’re an expert in such matters. Or that love is pity. Oh keep still. It’s bad enough not hear things like that. To hear them from you is revolting — even as a joke. What’s your answer? That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt, and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you’ve felt what it means to love as you and I know it — the total passion for the total height — you’re incapable of anything else.Ayn Rand — The Fountainhead
It's interesting to speculate on the reasons that make men so anxious to debase themselves. As in that idea of feeling small before nature. It's not a bromide, it's practically an institution. Have you noticed how self-righteous a man sounds when he tells you about it? Look, he seems to say, I'm so glad to be a pygmy, that's how virtuous I am. Have you heard with what delight people quote some great celebrity who's proclaimed that he's not so great when he looks at Niagara Falls? It's as if they were smacking their lips in sheer glee that their best is dust before the brute force of an earthquake. As if they were sprawling on all fours, rubbing their foreheads in the mud to the majesty of a hurricane. But that's not the spirit that leashed fire, steam, electricity, that crossed oceans in sailing sloops, that built airplanes and dams...and skyscrapers. What is it they fear? What is they hate so much, those who love to crawl? And why?Ayn Rand — The Fountainhead
I gotta tell you all about the romance of Northwest logging, like you keep talking about railroading, you shoulda seen the little narrow-gauge railways up there and those cold winter mornings with snow and your belly fulla pancakes and syrup and black coffee, boy, and you raise your doublebitted ax to your morning’s first log there’s nothing like it.Jack Kerouac — The Dharma Bums
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.Ayn Rand — Atlas Shrugged
He found a coin on the beach. An illformed disc of bronze washed all but barren by the centuries. He put it in his pocket. Remnants of vanished worlds in these outposts. Like the bones of ships among the rocks of remote northern seas. The bones of men.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
What hound of heaven had driven him to the high hills this afternoon? I thought of his car, with half a length between it and that drop of two thousand feet, and the blank expression on his face. What footsteps echoed in his mind, what whispers, and what memories, and why….Daphne du Maurier — Rebecca
Abraham saw signs of God and believed. Now the only sign is that all signs in the world make no difference. Is this God’s ironic revenge? But I am onto him.Walker Percy — The Moviegoer
“Aren’t you going to kiss me goodnight?” I kissed her. “Not that way.” Her arms slipped around my neck. She pulled my face down and sank her teeth into my lower lip. It stung and I fought her until I was free. She sat with one arm over the seat, smiling…John Fante — Ask the Dust
They began questioning Crockett and Poston. The officers had come looking for arson suspects, and a possible stolen vehicle. They found something totally unexpected. From Pursell’s report: “The interview resulted in some of the most unbelievable and fantastic information we had ever heard: tales of drug use, sex orgies, the actual attempt to re-create the days of Rommel and the Desert Corps by tearing over the countryside by night in numerous dune buggies, the stringing of field phones around the area for rapid communication, the opinion of the leader that he is Jesus Christ and seemed to be trying to form a cult of some sort…”Vincent Bugliosi — Helter Skelter
I tossed my shoulders and swaggered away, whistling with pleasure. In the gutter I saw a long cigaret butt. I picked it up without shame, lit it as I stood with one foot in the gutter, puffed it and exhaled toward the stars. I was an American, and goddamn proud of it.John Fante — Ask the Dust
Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of the cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.Cormac McCarthy — Suttree
I watched you dress. I felt your kiss on my forehead as you said goodbye, and that nauseated me too. Then you climbed out the window and I heard you stagger up the hillside, the grass swishing and little twigs breaking under your uncertain feet.John Fante — Ask the Dust
I caught her under her arms and she went rubber-legged on me instantly. I had to hold her close to hold her up. When her head was against my chest she screwed it around and giggled at me. "You're cute," she giggled. "I'm cute too."Raymond Chandler — The Big Sleep
For if the gods need of one thing, It is of heroes and human beings. I was reared by the euphony Of the rustling copse And learned to love Amid the flowers.Friedrich Hölderlin — Selected Poems and Fragments
KROQ is playing old Doors songs and War of the Worlds is on channel thirteen and I switch it to some religious program where this preacher is yelling "Let God use you. God wants to use you. Lie back and let him use you, use you." "Lie back," he keeps chanting. "Use you, use you." I'm drinking gin and melted ice in bed and imagine that I can hear someone breaking in. But Daniel says, over the phone, that it's probably my sisters getting something to drink. It's hard to believe Daniel tonight; on the news I hear there were four people beaten to death in the hills last night and I stay up most of the night, looking out the window, staring into the backyard, looking for werewolves.Bret Easton Ellis — Less Than Zero
There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin” — this sense that it was possible to go “too far,” and that many people were doing it — was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and I wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.Joan Didion — The White Album
In late winter an unexpected thaw. He walked the slushfilled roads in his boots. His diet was largely beans and rice and dried fruit and his clothes were falling off of him. He stood on the old wooden bridge below the house and watched the waters where they ferried darkly past the shelves of ice. There were cutthroat trout in the river but he'd lost all heart to kill things. One day he saw a mink loping humpbacked along a stretch of gravel. He whistled at it and it stopped and looked back at him and then continued on.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
(i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)E.E. Cummings — somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
Used to be a hobo right smart, back in the thirties. They wasnt no work I dont care what you could do. I was ridin through the mountains one night, state of Colorado. Dead of winter it was and bitter cold. I had just a smidgin of tobacco, bout enough for one or two smokes. I was in one of them old slatsided cars and I'd been up and down in it like a dog tryin to find some place where the wind wouldnt blow. Directly I scrunched up in a corner and rolled me a smoke and lit it and thowed the match down. Well, they was some sort of stuff in the floor about like tinder and it caught fire. I run to the door and got it open and we was goin up this grade through the mountains in the snow with the moon on it and it was just blue looking and dead quiet out there and them big old black pine trees going by. I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's the god's truth. That was in nineteen and thirty one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.Cormac McCarthy — Suttree
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me in one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.Walt Whitman — Song of Myself
Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great, unflattering laureate, Nature.Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns... driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.Homer — The Odyssey
Every now and then you run up on one of those days when everything’s in vain … a stone bummer from start to finish; and if you know what’s good for you, on days like these you sort of hunker down in a safe corner and watch. Maybe think a bit. Lay back on a cheap wooden chair, screened off from the traffic, and shrewdly rip the poptops out of five or eight Budweisers … smoke off a pack of King Marlboros, eat a peanut-butter sandwich, and finally toward evening gobble up a wad of good mescaline … then drive out, later on, to the beach. Get out in the surf, in the fog, and slosh along on numb-frozen feet about ten yards out from the tideline … stomping through tribes of wild sandpeckers … riderunners, whorehoppers, stupid little birds and crabs and saltsuckers, with here and there a big pervert or woolly reject gimping off in the distance, wandering alone by themselves behind the dunes and driftwood.…Hunter S. Thompson — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
At a red light on Sunset, I lean over and kiss her and she puts the car into second and speeds up. On the radio is a song I have already heard five times today but hum along to anyway. Blair lights a cigarette. We pass a poor woman with dirty, wild hair and a Bullock's bag sitting by her side full of yellowed newspapers. She's squatting on a sidewalk by the freeway, her face tilted toward the sky; eyes half-slits, because of the glare of the sun. Blair locks the doors and then we're driving along a side street up in the hills. No cars pass by. Blair turns the radio up. She doesn't see the coyote. It's big and brownish gray and the car hits it hard as it runs out into the middle of the street and Blair screams and tries to drive on, the cigarette falling from her lips. But the coyote is stuck under the wheels and it's squealing and the car is having difficulty moving.Bret Easton Ellis — Less Than Zero
She took the photo out and stood looking at it, just inside the door. "She has a beautiful little body, hasn't she?" "Uh-huh." She leaned a little towards me. "You ought to see mine," she said gravely. "Can it be arranged?" She laughed suddenly and sharply and went halfway through the door, then turned her head to say coolly: "You're as cold-blooded a beast as I ever met, Marlowe."Raymond Chandler — The Big Sleep
Psychedelics are almost irrelevant in a town where you can wander into a casino any time of the day or night and witness the crucifixion of a gorilla—on a flaming neon cross that suddenly turns into a pinwheel, spinning the beast around in wild circles above the crowded gambling action.Hunter S. Thompson — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Paris;this April sunset completely utters utters serenely silently a cathedral before whose upward lean magnificent face the streets turn young with rain, spiral acres of bloated rose coiled within cobalt miles of sky yield to and heed the mauve of twilight(who slenderly descends, daintily carrying in her eyes the dangerous first stars)E.E. Cummings — Paris; this April sunset completely utters
In gods and godhead only he can truly believe who himself is godlikeFriedrich Hölderlin — Hyperion
The storm passed and the dark sea lay cold and heavy. In the cool metallic waters the hammered shapes of great fishes. The reflection in the swells of a molten bolide trundling across the firmament like a burning train. He bent over his grammar in the light of the oil lamp. The straw roof hissing in the bellshaped dark above him and his shadow on the roughtroweled wall. Like those scholars of old in their cold stone rooms toiling at their scrolls. The lenses of their lamps that were made of tortoiseshell boiled and scraped and formed in a press and the fortuitous geographies they cast upon the tower walls of lands unknown alike to men or to their gods. Finally he leaned and cupped his hand to the glass chimney and blew out the lamp and lay back in the dark. He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
I let myself out of the house. I stood there, listening to the sunshine burn the grass.Raymond Chandler — The High Window
"Take off the mask..." Matt kept asking, sounding helpless, bewildered. "Eat it," the voice insisted. Matt said something I couldn't hear and I rewound the tape and pressed Play again. Matt, sounding increasingly like a child, was saying, "But ..it's still ... alive . .. please . . ." "EAT IT!" the voice commanded. The mic was adjusted so you could hear Matt chewing on the fish that the thing kept handing him. And then there was a click and music started playing, an elaborate piano riff that was automatically familiar - I knew it but couldn't place it at first. "Sing the song..." and Matt, weeping, tried to sing, encouraged by the awful voice. The wind died down, the waves paused, and only the crackling of the flames could be heard, and then I recognized "Year of the Cat" by Al Stewart.Bret Easton Ellis — The Shards
“What does it mean that those trees and mountains out there are not magic but real?” I’d yell, pointing outdoors.Jack Kerouac — The Dharma Bums
And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.James Joyce — Ulysses
He let me off, at about eight p.m., and I walked the three miles in silent freezing Carolina road of moon, watching a jet plane overhead, her stream drifting across the face of the moon and bisecting the snow circle.Jack Kerouac — The Dharma Bums
Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the window open and the swallows flying over the roofs of the houses and when it was dark afterward and you went to the window very small bats hunting over the houses and close down over the trees and we would drink the capri and the door locked and it hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan. That was how it ought to be.Ernest Hemingway — A Farewell to Arms
That the starry vault shall surcharge the heart with all rapturous marvelings, is only because we ourselves are greater miracles, and superber trophies than all the stars in universal space. Wonder interlocks with wonder, and then the confounding feeling comes. No cause have we to fancy, that a horse, a dog, a fowl, ever stand transfixed beneath yon skyey load of majesty. But our soul's arches underfit into its, and so, prevent the upper arch from falling on us with unsustainable inscrutableness. "Explain ye my deeper mystery," said the shepherd Chaldean king, smiting his breast, lying on his back upon the plain, "and then, I will bestow all my wonderings upon ye, ye stately stars!" So, in some sort, with Pierre. Explain thou this strange integral feeling in me myself, he thought-turning upon the fancied face-and I will then renounce all other wonders, to gaze wonderingly at thee.Herman Melville — Pierre
All right. He knew what he wanted. He wanted some money. He wanted a piece of ass. He wanted a big dinner, with all the trimmings. He wanted a bottle of whiskey. He wanted a car, in which he could drive a hundred miles an hour (he had only recently learned how to drive, and he loved the feelings of speed and control, the sharpness of the danger). He wanted some new clothes and thirty-dollar shoes. He wanted a .45 automatic. He wanted a record player in the big hotel room he wanted, so he could lie in bed with the whiskey and the piece of ass and listen to “How High Was the Moon” and “Artistry Jumps”. That was what he wanted.Don Carpenter — Hard Rain Falling
I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon. It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.Charles Simic — The World Doesn’t End
The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her--one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal.Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
Carter called today, but I saw no point in talking to him. On the whole I talk to no one. I concentrate on the way light would strike filled Mason jars on a kitchen windowsill. I lie here in the sunlight, watch the hummingbird. This morning I threw the coins in the swimming pool, and they gleamed and turned in the water in such a way that I was almost moved to read them. I refrained. One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.Joan Didion — Play It as It Lays
Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don’t ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul.Ayn Rand — The Fountainhead
Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he’d been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.Denis Johnson — Train Dreams
I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby
I called Dallas, and one hot afternoon we drove around the Hollywood hills and talked. Dallas had long blonde hair and a sundress and she was concerned about a run in her stockings and she did not hesitate when I asked what it meant to be a movie star. “It means being known all over the world,” she said. “And bringing my family a bunch of presents on Christmas Day, you know, like carloads, and putting them by the tree. And it means happiness, and living by the ocean in a huge house.”Joan Didion — The White Album
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.Raymond Chandler — Farewell, My Lovely
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel.Ayn Rand — The Fountainhead
I knew she would return. I did not wait. I lived my life. I wrote a few pages. I read a few books. I was serene: she would come back. It would be at night. I never thought of her as a thing to be considered by daylight. The many times I had seen her, none had been in the day. I expected her like I expected the moon.John Fante — Ask the Dust
Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.Ayn Rand — The Fountainhead
She tried to remember how it had been to drag Fremont Street in Vegas with Earl Lee Atkins when she was sixteen years old, how it had been to go out on the desert between Vegas and Boulder and drink beer from half-quart cans and feel her sunburn when he touched her and smell the chlorine from her own hair and the Lava soap from his and the sweet shark smell of starched cotton soaked with sweat. How High the Moon, the radio would play, Les Paul and Mary Ford … She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.Joan Didion — Play It As It Lays
But even Solomon, he says, ‘the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain’ (i.e., even while living) ‘in the congregation of the dead.’ Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
I remember I used to despise sheep for being so profoundly stupid. I’d seen them eat and eat and eat, I’d watched dogs outsmart whole flocks of them, I’d chased them and laughed at the stupid way they ran, watched them get themselves into all sorts of stupid, tangled situations, and I’d thought they quite deserved to end up as mutton, and that being used as wool-making machines was too good for them. It was years, and a long slow process, before I eventually realised just what sheep really represented: not their own stupidity, but our power, our avarice and egotism. After I’d come to understand evolution and know a little about history and farming, I saw that the thick white animals I laughed at for following each other around and getting caught in bushes were the product of generations of farmers as much as generations of sheep; we made them, we moulded them from the wild, smart survivors that were their ancestors so that they would become docile, frightened, stupid, tasty wool-producers.Iain Banks — The Wasp Factory
Latest News: Apollo’s become the god of journalists, press men, And his blue-eyed boy he who reports all the facts.Marcus Aurelius — Meditations
He knew that he still hoped for that small and half forgotten figure to fall in beside him. Leaning into the salt wind with his hands in his pockets and his clothes flapping. He'd seen him one final time in a dream. God's own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest. Trudging the shingles of the universe, his thin shoulders turned to the stellar winds and the suck of alien moons dark as stones. A lonely shoreloper hurrying against the night, small and friendless and brave.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
Is sin what I saw? is that what burned my eyes and left its brutal image in them? Furber slammed the Bible on the bench. No, he said aloud, rising. This is a matter for theology, not for feeling. His anger made him tremble. Nevertheless he straightened and turned to address a host of cherubim, speaking in level measured tones: early in their paradisal life the Lord God blessed His man and womankind and said be fruitful, multiply. But how could man beget unless his flesh would rise and what was there in innocence to move the simplest muscle in a gesture of desire? Were men to love unmindful, below the beasts, like flowers? It is impossible to know, of course.William Gass — Omensetter's Luck
Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery.Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
The other dream was this. There was a riderless horse standing at a gate at dawn. Some other country, some other time. The news that the horse brings is a day’s ride old, no more. The horse’s dreams were once of mares and grass and water. The sun. But those dreams are no more. His is a world of blood and slaughter and the screams of men and animals all of which he has little understanding of. The horse stands at the gate with his head bowed while the day breaks. He wears a cloak of knitted steel dark with blood and he stands with one forefoot tilted upon the stones. No one comes. The news does not arrive.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
He crossed along a low wall of sawn blocks opposite the pool and sat as he had sat that summer evening years ago and watched his sister perform the role of Medea alone on the quarry floor. She was dressed in a gown she’d made from sheeting and she wore a crown of woodbine in her hair. The footlights were fruitcans packed with rags and filled with kerosene. The reflectors were foil and the black smoke rose into the summer leaves above her and set them trembling while she strode the swept stone floor in her sandals. She was thirteen. He was in his second year of graduate school at Caltech and watching her that summer evening he knew that he was lost. His heart in his throat. His life no longer his.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
Maria made a list of things she would never do. She would never: walk through Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.Joan Didion — Play It As It Lays
If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders — What would you tell him? I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him? To shrug.Ayn Rand — Atlas Shrugged
Thus I did not determine to change the world out of an easy idealism and selfish righteousness that are invariably the harbingers of failure, nor did I determine to change the world so that my wealth and power might be enhanced; wealth beyond one’s comfort has always seemed to me the most boring of possessions, and power beyond its usefulness has seemed the most contemptible. It was destiny that seized me that afternoon at Apollonia nearly sixty years ago, and I chose not to avoid its embrace.John Williams — Augustus
Do you believe in God, Andrei? No. Neither do I. But that's a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know. What do you mean? Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they'd never understand what I meant. It's a bad question. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do—then, I know they don't believe in life. Why? Because, you see, God—whatever anyone chooses to call God—is one's highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it. You see, you and I, we believe in life. But you want to fight for it, to kill for it, even to die - for life. I only want to live it.Ayn Rand — We the Living
“Do you mean to tell me that you’re thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?” “Yes.” “My dear fellow, who will let you?” “That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”Ayn Rand — The Fountainhead
She wore a silver belt with the stars cut out from it, so that the stars were there and not quite there — and watching them Sam knew that he had not quite found her yet. He wished for a moment that he were not so entirely successful nor Mary so desirable — wished that they were both a little broken and would want to cling together. All the evening he felt a little sad watching the intangible stars as they moved here and there about the big room.F. Scott Fitzgerald — Day Off From Love
One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees - he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.Cormac McCarthy — The Road
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.F. Scott Fitzgerald — This Side of Paradise
The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the grey beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. “Long ago,” he said, “long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.”F. Scott Fitzgerald — Winter Dreams
The civil war turned nauseatingly murderous. An atmosphere of happy horror dominated the hours as Taylor’s men, dressed in looted wedding gowns and shower caps, battled with the army for the mansion. The shower caps were for the rain. The wedding dresses were without explanation. Meanwhile, Johnson’s troops, wearing red berets and women’s hairpieces liberated from the wigmakers, raced through the streets in hot-wired Mercedes Benzes, spraying bullets. The people living around the British embassy grew bold enough to ask Johnson’s rebels not to dump the corpses of their victims on the beach there because of the stink. The rebels said sure, okay. There are miles of beaches in Liberia.Denis Johnson — Seek
It was a limpid black night, hung as in a basket from a single dull star.F. Scott Fitzgerald — Tender is the Night
It was still dark and the fire had long since died, still dark and quiet with that silence that seems to be of itself listening, and astral quiet where planets collide soundlessly, beyond the auricular dimension altogether.Cormac McCarthy — The Orchard Keeper
The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with the lingering death of the last stars and the premature birth of the first newsboys. The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from the coal.F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Beautiful and Damned
A restless impulse urges him to embark / And meet lone Death on the drear ocean’s waste / For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves / The slimy caverns of the populous deep.Percy Bysshe Shelley — Alastor
Two miles further on dusk overtook him, the shortening twilight of late April, in which the blanched dogwoods stood among the darker trees with spread raised palms like praying nuns; there was the evening star and already the whippoorwills.William Faulkner — The Hamlet
There was a song I heard when I was in Los Angeles by a local group. The song was called ‘Los Angeles’ and the words and images were so harsh and bitter that the song would reverberate in my mind for days. The images, I later found out, were personal and no one I knew shared them. The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. Images of people, teenagers my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun. These images stayed with me even after I left the city. Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. After I left.Bret Easton Ellis — Less Than Zero
That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.John Steinbeck — The Grapes of Wrath
Borman looked around. Somewhere out here the last ivorybill died. Thirty years ago probably. I still listen for them. What sense does that make? They’re gone forever. I didnt know you were a bird watcher. I’m not. I’m a forever watcher. Forever is a long time. Tell me about it. I have weird dreams, man. I dream about animals sometimes and they’ll be dressed up in robes like judges and they’ll be trying to decide what to do with my ass. In the dream I dont know what it is that I’ve done. Just that I’ve done it. You may be right. Maybe I need to get out of here.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
Of one thing I’m sure - Celtic you’ll live and Celtic you’ll die; so if you don’t use heaven as a continual referendum for your ideas you’ll find earth a continual recall for your ambitions.F. Scott Fitzgerald — This Side of Paradise
The commonness of all things in the earth he remembered with a strange familiarity - he dreamed of the quiet roads, the moonlit woodlands, and he thought that some day he would come to them on foot, and find them unchanged, in all the wonder of recognition. They existed for him anciently and forever.Thomas Wolfe — Look Homeward, Angel
“Mr. Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees. I was drunk, cried Suttree.”Cormac McCarthy — Suttree
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.Edgar Allan Poe — The Philosophy of Composition
She crouched in the bushes and watched it, a huge horse emerging seared and whole from the sun’s eye and passing like a wrecked caravel gaunt-ribbed and black and mad with tattered saddle and dangling stirrups and hoofs clopping softly in the dust and passing enormous and emaciate and inflamed and the sound of it dying down the road to a distant echo of applause in a hall forever empty.Cormac McCarthy — Outer Dark
Every man’s death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?Cormac McCarthy — Cities of the Plain
At night we hear the trainers from the base down there, and see them blotting out the stars, and I stand on the hill and listen, bone white with desire. It was love that sent me on the journey, love that called me home. But it’s the terror of being just one person — one chance, one set of days — that keeps me absolutely still tonight and makes me listen intently to those young men above us flying their airplanes in the dark.Denis Johnson — The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly
If you who own things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, we’re results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I”, and cuts you off forever from the “we”.John Steinbeck — The Grapes of Wrath
They spread their soogans and he pulled off his boots and stood them beside him and stretched out in his blankets. The fire had burned to coals and he lay looking up at the stars in their places and the hot belt of matter that ran the chord of the dark vault overhead and he put his hands on the ground at either side of him and pressed them against the earth and in that coldly burning canopy of black he slowly turned dead center to the world, all of it taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands.Cormac McCarthy — All the Pretty Horses
The Vine had no jukebox but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce. “Nurse,” I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. “You have a lovely pitching arm.” You had to go down to them like a hummingbird over a blossom. I saw her much later, not too many years ago, and when I smiled she seemed to believe I was making advances. But it was only that I remembered. I’ll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.Denis Johnson — Jesus’ Son
The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where one person in every thirty-eight lives in a trailer. Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know how to look: the movies and magazines.Joan Didion — Slouching Towards Bethlehem
He looked into those blue eyes like a man seeking some vision of the increate future of the universe. He’d hardly breath to speak at all and he told her that she was very beautiful and she smiled and in her eyes was the sadness he’d first seen the night she came to his room and he knew that while he was contained in that sadness he was not the whole of it.Cormac McCarthy — All the Pretty Horses
You want to know when was the last time I saw anybody. I could ask you when was the last time you didnt see anybody. When was the last time you just sat by yourself. Watched it get dark. Watched it get light. Thought about your life. Where you’d been and where you were goin. Was there a reason for any of it.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you?Thomas Wolfe — Look Homeward, Angel
The Sabbath had passed and in the gray Monday dawn a procession of schoolchildren dressed in blue uniforms all alike were being led along the gritty walkway. The woman had stepped from the curb to take them across at the intersection when she saw the man coming up the street all dark with blood bearing in his arms the dead body of a friend. She held up her hand and the children stopped and huddled with their books at their breasts. He passed. They could not take their eyes from him. The dead boy in his arms hung with his head back and those partly opened eyes beheld nothing at all out of that passing landscape of street or wall or paling sky or the figures of the children who stood blessing themselves in the gray light. This man and his burden passed on forever out of that nameless crossroads and the woman stepped once more into the street and the children followed and all continued on to their appointed places which as some believe were chosen long ago even to the beginning of the world.Cormac McCarthy — Cities of the Plain
The oldest known violin is an Amati believed to be from 1564 that’s in the Ashmolean at Oxford. The oldest instrument we studied was from 1580 and the latest was probably a German violin from the 1960s. Aside from the angle of the neck they were the same. Nothing had changed. Nothing. That seems rather remarkable. Yes. What’s even more remarkable is that there is no prototype to the violin. It simply appears out of nowhere in all its perfection. And what do you make of that? You’ve told me this for a reason. It’s just another mystery to add to the roster. Leonardo cant be explained. Or Newton, or Shakespeare. Or endless others. Well. Probably not endless. But at least we know their names. But unless you’re willing to concede that God invented the violin there is a figure who will never be known. A small man who went with his son into the stunted forests of the little iceage of fifteenth century Italy and sawed and split the maple trees and put the flitches to dry for seven years and then stood in the slant light of his shop one morning and said a brief prayer of thanks to his creator and then—knowing this perfect thing—took up his tools and turned to its construction. Saying now we begin.Cormac McCarthy — Stella Maris
Not sin, he thought. I don’t believe in sin. It’s getting out of timing. You are born submerged in anonymous lockstep with the teeming anonymous myriads of your time and generation; you get out of step once, falter once, and you are trampled to death.William Faulkner — The Wild Palms
The guardian of the lake was a lonely man, the more so because he had a wife. He showed me her picture in a plastic shield in his wallet, a prettyish blonde girl trying her best to live up to the pictures in the magazines, a girl of products, home permanents, shampoos, rinses, skin conditioners. She hated being out in the sticks, longed for the great and gracious life in Toledo or South Bend. Her only company was found in the shiny pages of Charm or Glamour. Eventually, she would sulk her way to success. Her husband would get a job in some great clanging organism of progress, and they would live happily ever after. All this came through in small, oblique spurts in his conversation. She knew exactly what she wanted and he didn’t, but his want would ache in him all his life. After he drove away in his Jeep I lived his life for him and it put a mist of despair on me. He wanted his pretty little wife and he wanted something else and he couldn’t have both.John Steinbeck — Travels With Charley
If human values are removed from production, how can they be preserved in consumption? How can we value our lives if we devalue them in making a living? If we do not live where we work, and when we work, we are wasting our lives, and our work too.Wendell Berry — The Unsettling of America
Well, I’m too conceited to want admiration. But if you do want it - who can give it to you? Who is capable of it? Who can still want to be capable? It’s a curse, you know, to be able to look higher than you’re allowed to reach. One’s safer looking down, the farther down the safest - these days.Ayn Rand — We the Living
We pass a gorgeous woman completely naked but covered with black mud. She’s been rolling in a mud-hole with her friends. I guess I’m staring because she says, “Like what you see?” “In a day full of erotic visions, you’re the most erotic vision of all,” I tell her. To me, it’s a poem, but she just thinks I’m fucked.Denis Johnson — Seek
Love is fragile - she was thinking - but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love words, the tenderness learned, are treasured up for the next lover.F. Scott Fitzgerald
‘In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in’F. Scott Fitzgerald — Tender Is the Night
"But you see," said Roark quietly, "I have, let's say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards - and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one."Ayn Rand — The Fountainhead
I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life, and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, that’s all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!Albert Camus — The Fall
It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.F. Scott Fitzgerald — This Side of Paradise
For years afterward when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.F. Scott Fitzgerald — This Side of Paradise
It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.Cormac McCarthy — Outer Dark
I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.Cormac McCarthy — No Country for Old Men
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby
What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.Ayn Rand — Atlas Shrugged
There are people you remember and people you dream of.Carlos Ruiz Zafón — The Shadow of the Wind
The accumulated memories of annual emotion / May be concentrated into a great joy / Which shall also be a great fear, as on the occasion / When fear came upon every soul: / Because the beginning shall remind us of the end / And the first coming of the second coming.T.S. Eliot — Choruses from 'The Rock'
In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.Friedrich Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A landscape of low shacks of tin and cratewood here on the outskirts of the city. Barren dirt and gravel lots and beyond them the plains of sage and creosote. Roosters were calling and the air smelled of burning charcoal. He took his bearings by the gray light to the east and set out toward the city. In the cold dawn the lights were still burning out there under the dark cape of the mountains with that precious insularity common to cities of the desert. A man was coming down the road driving a donkey piled high with firewood. In the distance the churchbells had begun. The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of the claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transiencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.Cormac McCarthy — Cities of the Plain
Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for response and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.Alexander Hamilton — Federalist No. 8
She laughs and looks out the window and I think for a minute that she's going to start to cry. I'm standing by the door and I look over at the Elvis Costello poster, at his eyes, watching her, watching us, and I try to get her away from it, so I tell her to come over here, sit down, and she thinks I want to hug her or something and she comes over to me and puts her arms around my back and says something like 'I think we've all lost some sort of feeling’.Bret Easton Ellis — Less Than Zero
Western slowed. The Kid trudged on. He had been dreaming. At some last reckoning a child’s name had been called but the child did not answer and the ship of heaven plowed on all alight into eternity leaving her alone on the darkening shore forever lost. He hurried to catch up.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
Grainier was aware only of a great amazement, and then he was high in the sky, while his stomach was somewhere else. It never did catch up with him. He looked down at the fairgrounds as if from a cloud. The earth's surface turned sideways, and he misplaced all sense of up and down. The craft righted itself and began a slow, rackety ascent, winding its way upward like a wagon around a mountain. Except for the churning in his gut, Grainier felt he might be getting accustomed to it all. At this point the pilot looked backward at him, resembling a raccoon in his cap and goggles, shouting and baring his teeth, and then he faced forward. The plane began to plummet like a hawk, steeper and steeper, its engine almost silent, and Grainier's organs pushed back against his spine. He saw the moment with his wife and child as they drank Hood's Sarsaparilla in their little cabin on a summer's night, then another cabin he'd never remembered before, the places of his hidden childhood, a vast golden wheat field, heat shimmering above a road, arms encircling him, and a woman's voice crooning, and all the mysteries of this life were answered. The present world materialized before his eyes as the engine roared and the plane leveled off, circled the fairgrounds once, and returned to earth, landing so abruptly Grainier's throat nearly jumped out of his mouth.Denis Johnson — Train Dreams
Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable.Cormac McCarthy — The Crossing
Faint winds, and a song fading and leaves falling, Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter... And the rain and over the fields a voice calling... Our gray blown cloud scurries and lifts above, Slides on the sun and flutters there to waft her Sisters on. The shadow of a dove Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings; And down the valley through the crying trees The body of the darker storm flies; brings With its new air the breath of sunken seas And slender tenuous thunder... But I wait... Wait for the mists and for the blacker rain-- Heavier winds that stir the veil of fate, Happier winds that pile her hair; Again They tear me, teach me, strew the heavy air Upon me, winds that I know, and storm. There was a summer every rain was rare; There was a season every wind was warm.... And now you pass me in the mist... your hair Rain-blown about you, damp lips curved once more In that wild irony, that gay despair That made you old when we have met before; Wraith-like you drift on out before the rain, Across the fields, blown with the stemless flowers, With your old hopes, dead leaves and loves again-- Dim as a dream and wan with all old hours (Whispers will creep into the growing dark... Tumult will die over the trees) Now night Tears from her wetted breast the splattered blouse Of day, glides down the dreaming hills, tear-bright, To cover with her hair the eerie green... Love for the dusk... Love for the glistening after; Quiet the trees to their last tops... serene... Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter...F. Scott Fitzgerald — This Side of Paradise
“You'll find another…God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.”F. Scott Fitzgerald — This Side of Paradise
He knew that her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories and in his dreams and soon after that nowhere at all. She came in half nude trailing sarsenet or perhaps just her Grecian sheeting crossing a stone stage in the smoking footlamps or she would push back the cowl of her robe and her blonde hair would fall about her face as she bent to him where he lay in the damp and clammy sheets and whisper to him I’d have been your shadowlane, the keeper of that house alone wherein your soul is safe. And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw half-sentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade. He woke sweating and switched on the bedlamp and swung his feet to the floor and sat with his face in his hands. Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
‘Americans are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.’Kurt Vonnegut — Cat's Cradle
Thou runnest ahead? —Dost thou do so as a shepherd or as an exception? A third alternative would be the fugitive... First question of conscience.Friedrich Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra
When I was younger—ten, eleven—I had a sort of waking dream that was frightening to me. And then I realized that it was neither waking nor a dream. It was something else. And I had no reason to believe that what I saw did not exist and that if that realm was unknown to us that didnt make it less threatening but more. What was the dream? Or the vision or whatever it was. I saw through something like a judas hole into this world where there were sentinels standing at a gate and I knew that beyond the gate was something terrible and that it had power over me. Something terrible. Yes. A being. A presence. And that the search for shelter and for a covenant among us was simply to elude this baleful thing of which we were in endless fear and yet of which we had no knowledge. You were how old? Ten. I think ten. Did you have this vision again? No. There was nothing else to see. The keepers at the gate saw me and they gestured among themselves and then all of that went dark and I never saw it again. I called it the Archatron. The presence beyond the gate. The presence beyond the gate. And it was shrouded away. Yes. But nothing is changed. Nothing is changed.Cormac McCarthy — Stella Maris
The perfect life. I’d like my life to be perfect. I’d like to suffer, if I could find something worth suffering for, and I’d like to never do anything low or small or mean, but just have big sins.F. Scott Fitzgerald — Basil and Josephine
In the years to come he would walk the beach all but daily. Sometimes he’d lie at night in the dry sand above the wrack-line and like the mariners of old study the stars. Perhaps to see how he might plot his course. Or to see what enterprise might be read as favorable in their slow crawl over the black and eternal vastness.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Crack-Up
I’d been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I’d even known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.Denis Johnson — Jesus’ Son
The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.Cormac McCarthy — The Crossing
That which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality.Ayn Rand — Atlas Shrugged
Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.Ralph Waldo Emerson — Essays: Second Series
I see him standing there over his plumb bob which never lies and the plumb bob is pointing motionless to the unimaginable center of the earth four thousand miles beneath his feet. Pointing to a blackness where God and matter are locked in a collaboration that is silent nowhere in the universe and it is this that guides him as he places his stone one over two and two over one as did his fathers before him and his sons to follow and the let the rain carve them if it can.Cormac McCarthy — The Stonemason
Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.Chuck Palahniuk — Fight Club
‘I was watching his left hand and walked into a right hook’John Steinbeck — Sweet Thursday
So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?Ayn Rand — Atlas Shrugged
“Two people meet,” he said. “They each have three or four qualities they can show each other, you know the ones I’m talking about, the ones that always gets them by. For the women it could be that she makes jokes all the time, or she could be kind of self-effacing. The man could be scientific and easygoing. He could show her he likes her jokes because he has a good sense of humor, and he could deliver some compliments. That shows he’s not going to beat her up, like the other guys did.”Denis Johnson — Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
‘You cannot cut the ground out from underneath a man and expect him to act normally’John Steinbeck — Sweet Thursday
Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak.Cormac McCarthy — Blood Meridian
I want to go back," Daniel says, quietly, with effort. "Where?" I ask, unsure. There's a long pause that kind of freaks me out and Daniel finishes his drink and fingers the sunglasses he's still wearing and says, "I don't know. Just back.“Bret Easton Ellis — Less Than Zero
I thought that I would go to Romania and that when I got there I would go to some small town and buy secondhand clothes in the market. Shoes. A blanket. I’d burn everything I owned. My passport. Maybe I’d just put my clothes in the trash. Change money in the street. Then I’d hike into the mountains. Stay off the road. Take no chances. Crossing the ancestral lands by foot. Maybe by night. There are bears and wolves up there. I looked it up. You could have a small fire at night. Maybe find a cave. A mountain stream. I’d have a canteen for water for when the time came that I was too weak to move about. After a while the water would taste extraordinary. It would taste like music. I’d wrap myself in the blanket at night against the cold and watch the bones take shape beneath my skin and I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died. Sometimes at night the animals would come to the edge of the fire and move about and their shadows would move among the trees and I would understand that when the last fire was ashes they would come and carry me away and I would be their eucharist. And that would be my life. And I would be happy.Cormac McCarthy — Stella Maris
From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams.Bret Easton Ellis — Lunar Park
He looked to the east to see if there were any trace of dawn graying over the country but there was only the darkness and the stars. He prodded the ashes with a stick. The few red coals that turned up in the fire’s black heart seemed secret and improbable. Like the eyes of things disturbed that had best been left alone. He rose and walked down to the lake with the scrape about his shoulders and he looked at the stars in the lake. The wind had died and the water lay black and still. It lay like a hole in that high desert world down into which the stars were drowning.Cormac McCarthy — The Crossing
The bird whistled again, invisible, a sound meaningless and profound, inflexionless, ceasing as thought cut off with the blow of a knife, and again, and that sense of water swift and peaceful above secret places, felt, not seen not heard.William Faulkner
The masses seem to be worth notice in three aspects only: first, as the copies of great men, printed on bad paper from worn out plates; next, as a contrast to the great men; and lastly, as their tools.Friedrich Nietzsche — On the Use and Abuse of History
A sad and bitter season. Barrenness of heart and gothic loneliness. Suttree dreamed old dreams of fairgrounds where young girls with flowered hair and wide child eyes watched by flare light sequined aerialists aloft. Visions of unspeakable loveliness from a world lost. To make you ache with want.Cormac McCarthy — Suttree
I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.Ernest Hemingway — The Sun Also Rises
They saw patched argonauts from the states driving mules through the streets on their way south through the mountains to the coast. Goldseekers. Itinerant degenerants bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague. They nodded or spoke to the prisoners and dropped tobacco and coins in the street beside them. They saw blackeyed young girls with painted faces smoking little cigars, going arm in arm and eyeing them brazenly. They saw the governor himself erect and formal within his silkmullioned sulky clatter forth from the double doors of the palace courtyard and they saw one day a pack of viciouslooking humans mounted on unshod indian ponies riding half drunk through the streets, bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up with thews and armed with weapons of every description, revolvers of enormous weight and bowieknives the size of claymores and short twobarreled rifles with bores you could stick your thumbs in and the trappings of their horses fashioned out of human skin and their bridles woven up from human hair and decorated with human teeth and the riders wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears and the horses rawlooking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like feral dogs and riding also in the company a number of halfnaked savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy, brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh.Cormac McCarthy — Blood Meridian
What Tyler really thought was that the dead were so absolutely beyond anything the living might do for them it was almost past comprehension and he had no commitment to meet anyone anywhere. He feared that beyond the quilted gray satin of the undertaker’s keep there was only a world of mystery that bypassed the comprehension of men and did not even take them into consideration. A world of utter darkness and the profoundest of silences.William Gay — Twilight
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.Friedrich Nietzsche
For there is no necessary antithesis between chastity and sensuality; for every good marriage, every genuine heartfelt love transcends this antithesis.Friedrich Nietzsche — On the Genealogy of Morals
He walked down the street and crossed the railroad tracks. The redness of the evening in the glass of the buildings. Very high a small and trembling flight of geese. Fording the last of the day in the thin air. Following the shape of the river below. He stood above the bank of riprap. Rock and broken paving. The slow coil of the passing water. In the coming night he thought that men would band together in the hills. Feeding their small fires with the deeds and the covenants and the poetry of their fathers. Documents they’d no gift to read in a cold to loot men of their souls.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
We talk of poetry in such an abstract way because most of us are bad poets. The aesthetic phenomenon is fundamentally a simple one: grant someone only the ability continually to see a living play, to live constantly surrounded by hordes of spirits, and he will be a poet. If one feels the desire to transform oneself and to speak from other bodies and souls, one is a dramatist.Friedrich Nietzsche — The Birth of Tragedy
The summer was drunk and night and warm and the lake. An image I never saw: my cold hands running over his smooth, wet back. Bruce tells me to touch myself, right now, in the phone booth. The house I'm in is silent. I wave away a mosquito. "I can't touch myself," I say. I slowly sink to the floor still holding the phone. "Being rich is cool," Bruce says. "Bruce," I'm saying. "Bruce." He asked me about last summer. He mentions Saratoga, the lake, a night I don't remember at a bar in Pittsfield. I don't say anything. "Can you hear me?" he's asking. "Yeah," I whisper. "Is, like, the connection clear?" he asks. I'm staring at a drawing: a cup of cappuccino overloaded with foam and beneath that two words scrawled in black: THE FUTURE. "Mellow out," Bruce sighs, finally.Bret Easton Ellis — The Informers
These are the things the maps might tell you, or the newspapers. The people of the Mojave will tell you you’re getting closer to the Nevada line and that you can wander at seventy mph up Interstate 15 through Nipton and other towns without grass — towns made out of trailers and stunned by heat — to Las Vegas, a city that cherishes several green lawns and some trees and seems to take place in an enormous silence, like a phonograph playing in the wilderness. Even indoors the games clink and whir irrelevantly within the larger pursuit of time going into the endlessness. Las Vegas is not forbidding. It’s an inviting town; in fact it’s a town that’s hard to get out of. And yet, it’s a simple matter to walk after dark down the Strip to the border of neon and, whether you’re a winner or a loser, to stare at a blackness that seems to reach down into the heart of all experience.Denis Johnson — Seek
The traveling salesmen fed me pills that made the lining of my veins feel scraped out, my jaw ached... I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened. Like I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside, I knew we'd have an accident in the rain. I didn't care. They said they'd take me all the way.Denis Johnson — Jesus’ Son
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.Ayn Rand — Atlas Shrugged
Schopenhauer thought that if the universe vanished music alone would remain. The rules are the music. Without the rules you have nothing but noise. When we hear a wrong note we wince. We smile or weep or march to war. Can you explain any of that? How do you know when someone is dancing? What if they are dancing out of time with the music?Cormac McCarthy — Stella Maris
Once, while cleaning the trout before I went home in the almost night, I had a vision of going over to the poor graveyard and gathering up grass and fruit jars and tin cans and markers and wilted flowers and bugs and weeds and clods and going home and putting a hook in the vise and tying a fly with all that stuff and then going outside and casting it up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening star.Richard Brautigan — Trout Fishing in America
When you get to topos theory you are at the edge of another universe. You have found a place to stand where you can look back at the world from nowhere. It’s not just some gestalt. It’s fundamental.Cormac McCarthy — Stella Maris
I had heard there was some good fishing in there and it was running clear while all the other large creeks were running muddy from the snow melting off the Marble Mountains. I also heard there were some Eastern brook trout in there, high up in the mountains, living in the wakes of beaver dams.Richard Brautigan — Trout Fishing in America
The night wind is telling the wonders of the upper mountains, their snow fountains and gardens, forests and groves; even their topography is in its tones. And the stars, the everlasting sky lilies, how bright they are now that we have climbed above the lowland dust! The horizon is bounded and adorned by a spiry wall of pines, every tree harmoniously related to every other; definite symbols, divine hieroglyphics written with sunbeams. Would I could understand them! The stream flowing past the camp through ferns and lilies and alders makes sweet music to the ear, but the pines marshaled around the edge of the sky make a yet sweeter music to the eye. Divine beauty all. Here I could stay tethered forever with just bread and water, nor would I be lonely; loved friends and neighbors, as love for everything increased, would seem all the nearer however many the miles and mountains between us.John Muir — My First Summer in the Sierra
One of the things I realized was that the universe had been evolving for countless billions of years in total darkness and total silence and that the way that we imagine it is not the way that it was. In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against. And the question once again of the nature of that reality to which there was no witness. All of this until the first living creature possessed of vision agreed to imprint the universe upon its primitive and trembling sensorium and then to touch it with color and movement and memory. It made of me an overnight solipsist and to some extent I am yet.Cormac McCarthy — Stella Maris
We’d walked on the beach the night before and there was a moon and a mock moon that rode in the rings and we talked about the paraselene and I said something to the effect that to speak of such things which are composed solely of light as problematic or perhaps as wrongly seen or even wrongly known or of questionable reality had always seemed to me something of a betrayal. He looked at me and he said betrayal? And I said yes. Things composed of light. In need of our protection. Then in the morning we sat in the sand and drank our tea and watched the sun come up.Cormac McCarthy — Stella Maris
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.… And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.… So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.Hunter S. Thompson — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I’ve had enough. I’m going to get out of New York. Tomorrow I’m leaving for Alaska. I’m going to find an ice-cold creek near the Arctic where that strange beautiful moss grows and spend a week with the grayling. My address will be, Trout Fishing in America, c/o General Delivery, Fairbanks, Alaska.Richard Brautigan — Trout Fishing in America
I glanced over at my attorney, but he was staring up at the sky, and I could see that his brain had gone off to that campground beyond the sun. Thank christ he can’t hear this music, I thought. It would drive him into a racist frenzy.Hunter S. Thompson — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
He shook his head, struggling to focus on the question. “Shit,” he said finally. “I met her on the plane and I had all that acid.” He shrugged. “You know, those little blue barrels. Jesus, she’s a religious freak. She’s running away from home for something like the fifth time in six months. It’s terrible. I gave her that cap before I realized … shit, she’s never even had a drink!” “Well,” I said, “it’ll probably work out. We can keep her loaded and peddle her ass at the drug convention.” He stared at me. “She’s perfect for this gig,” I said. “These cops will go fifty bucks a head to beat her into submission and then gang-fuck her. We can set her up in one of these back-street motels, hang pictures of Jesus all over the room, then turn these pigs loose on her … Hell, she’s strong; she’ll hold her own.”Hunter S. Thompson — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
We wound up at a place called The Big Flip about halfway downtown. I had a “New York steak” for $1.88. My attorney ordered the “Coyote Bush Basket” for $2.09 … and after that we drank off a pot of watery “Golden West” coffee and watched four boozed-up cowboy types kick a faggot half to death between the pinball machines.Hunter S. Thompson — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
“Wait a minute!” my attorney shouted … and then to the girl: “Pardon me, lady, but I think there’s some kind of ignorant chicken-sucker in this car who needs his face cut open.” He plunged his hand into the pocket of his black plastic jacket and turned to face the people crowded into the rear of the elevator. “You cheap honky faggots,” he snarled. “Which one of you wants to get cut?”Hunter S. Thompson — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The world you live in is shored up by a collective of agreements. Is that something you think about? The hope is that the truth of the world somehow lies in the common experience of it. Of course the history of science and mathematics and even philosophy is a good bit at odds with this notion. Innovation and discovery by definition war against the common understanding. One should be wary.Cormac McCarthy — Stella Maris
My father came in and found me there and I thought I was in trouble and I jumped up but he took me by the hand and led me back to the chair and sat me down and went over the paper with me. His explanations were clear. Simple. But it was more than that. They were filled with metaphor. He drew a couple of Feynman diagrams and I thought they were pretty cool. They mapped the world of the subatomic particles he was attempting to explain. The collisions. The weighted routes. I understood—really understood—that the equations were not a supposition of the form whose life was confined to the symbols on the page which described them but that they were there before my eyes. In actuality. They were in the paper, the ink, in me. The universe. Their invisibility could never speak against them or their being. Their age. Which was the age of reality itself. Which was itself invisible and always had been. He never let go of my hand.Cormac McCarthy — Stella Maris
Most suicides dont need a voice. What should give you pause is that suicide scales with intelligence in the animal kingdom and you might wonder if this is not true of individuals as well as of species. I would. Do you think that there is something suicides have in common? Some common mindset? Yes. They dont like it here.Cormac McCarthy — Stella Maris
Well. I guess what I understand is that at the core of the world of the deranged is the realization that there is another world and that they are not a part of it. They see that little is required of their keepers and much of them.Cormac McCarthy — Stella Maris
Life is awfully important so if you’ve given it away you’d ought to think with all your mind in the last moments of your life about the thing you traded it for. So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and honor and the safety of the home and the stars and stripes forever? You’re goddam right they didn’t. They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the thing they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child. They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important. They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live.Dalton Trumbo — Johnny Got His Gun
To talk with Lucky to be with Lucky to lie with Lucky was like finding peace in a heathen country it was like breathing the air of a place you love when you’re sick and dying for a breath of it. To see her smile to hear her bright chatter to watch her bony little fingers fly as they worked the crochet needle with the night noises of Paris a foreign city just outside the window was enough to make anybody feel better and less lonely.Dalton Trumbo — Johnny Got His Gun
The actual issue is that someone a hundred thousand years ago sat up in his robes and said Holy Shit. Sort of. He didnt have a language yet. But what he had just understood is that one thing can be another thing. Not look like it or act upon it. Be it. Stand for it. Pebbles can be goats. Sounds can be things. The name for water is water. What seems inconsequential to us by reason of usage is in fact the founding notion of civilization. Language, art, mathematics, everything. Ultimately the world itself and all in it.Cormac McCarthy — Stella Maris
Good for you. When you carry a child in your arms it will turn its head to see where it’s going. Not sure why. It’s going there anyway. You just need to grab your best hold, that’s all. You think there’s these rules about who gets to ride the bus and who gets to be here and who gets to be there. How did you get here? Well, she just rode in on her lunarcycle. I see you looking for tracks in the carpet but if we can be here at all we can leave tracks. Or not. The real issue is that every line is a broken line. You retrace your steps and nothing is familiar. So you turn around to come back only now you’ve got the same problem going the other way. Every worldline is discrete and the caesura ford a void that is bottomless. Every step traverses death.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
He wouldnt have thought that to believe in God—or not—would be a conscious decision. You were probably either a believer or you werent. I’m sure he thought that he was too young to die, but I’m not sure how the Godless deal with death. Would that include you? You’re just going to get idiosyncratic responses. What’s the point? I’ll take what I can get. If you dont know what life is—and you dont—then I’m not sure how you would characterize the absence of it. I suppose we think that we know where we are but that is obviously absurd. To die is difficult, but to die without knowing where it is that you have been. Or why. Well. Anyway, I’m guessing that what you’re trying to come to grips with is what sort of mind would dedicate itself to blowing up the world.Cormac McCarthy — Stella Maris
He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.Richard Brautigan — Trout Fishing in America
Here ends my forever memorable first High Sierra excursion. I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built; and rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again.John Muir — My First Summer in the Sierra
He pulled out a chair and hung his leather jacket over the back of it and sat. The chairs had come out of the mountains and were made of ash, the spindles and rails turned on a treadle lathe in a world no longer even imaginable.Cormac McCarthy — The Passenger
“She’s a nice girl. Not my type.” “You don’t like them nice?” He had another cigarette going. The smoke was being fanned away from his face by his hand. “I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.” “They take you to the cleaners,” Randall said indifferently. “Sure. Where else have I ever been?Raymond Chandler — Farewell, My Lovely
Despite that pride, he had no interest in my working there: “Your generation will make its living with their minds, not their hands,” he once told me. The only acceptable career at Armco was as an engineer, not as a laborer in the weld shop. A lot of other Middletown parents and grandparents must have felt similarly: To them, the American Dream required forward momentum. Manual labor was honorable work, but it was their generation’s work—we had to do something different. To move up was to move on. That required going to college.J. D. Vance — Hillbilly Elegy
She faced me squarely. Her eyes were bright. There might have been a hint of tears in them. A lovely dish and no mistake.Raymond Chandler — The Long Goodbye
What is a rainbow, Lord? A hoop For the lowly.Jack Kerouac — The Dharma Bums
I was drunk that night, Camilla, drunk on seventy-eight cent whiskey,John Fante — Ask the Dust
Slow as sheep they moved, tranquil, impassable, filling the passages, contemplating the fretful hurrying of those in urban shirts and collars with the large, mild inscrutability of cattle or of gods, functioning outside of time, having left time lying upon the slow and imponderable land green with corn and cotton in the yellow afternoon.William Faulkner — Sanctuary
But poor old man and his dissolving head. Visit him at the farm sometime, he’ll tell you what he sees: gray mists, vapors, spaces, holes. Stares straight ahead. The kindly ladies keep him clean. Might as well look one way as another, he says, it’s all around, just open up your eyes and look …William H. Gass — Cartesian Sonata
And rats in all the attics. The rain came in. But they never sent; never came. Some of the locks had gone, so the doors banged. She didn’t like to be up here at dusk alone neither. It was too much for one woman, too much, too much. She creaked, she moaned. She banged the door. She turned the key in the lock, and left the house alone, shut up, locked.Virginia Woolf — To the Lighthouse
The girl lay back, her hands behind her neck, her legs over the bed. I shall smell lilacs in Connecticut, no doubt, before I die, and see the clean white small reticent churches of my youth, the pasture bars I broke to run away.John Fante — Ask the Dust
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.Dan Simmons — Hyperion
You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life. They’re plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congresses. That’s their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead. Hmmmm. But what do the dead say?Dalton Trumbo — Johnny Got His Gun
a beautiful darling young blonde in a snow-white strapless bathing suit and barefooted with a gold bracelet on her ankle, driving a next-year’s cinnamon-red Lincoln Mercury, who wanted benzedrine so she could drive all the way to the CityJack Kerouac — The Dharma Bums
But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.Virginia Woolf — To the Lighthouse
The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.Raymond Chandler — The Long Goodbye
Ten blocks of that, winding down curved rain-swept streets, under the steady drip of trees, past lighted windows in big houses in ghostly enormous grounds, vague clusters of eaves and gables and lighted windows high on the hillside, remote and inaccessible, like witch houses in a forest.Raymond Chandler — The Big Sleep
"Perhaps you don't ever make passes at women in bars." "Not often. The light's too dim." "But a lot of women go to bars just to have passes made at them." "A lot of women get up in the morning with the same idea." "But liquor is an aphrodisiac--up to a point." "Doctors recommend it." "Who said anything about doctors? I want my diampagne." I kissed her some more. It was light, pleasant work. "I want to kiss your poor cheek," she said, and did. "It's burning hot," she said. "The rest of me is freezing." "It is not. I want my champagne." "Why?" "It'll get flat if we don't drink it. Besides I like the taste of it." "All right." "Do you love me very much? Or will you if I go to bed with you?" "Possibly." "You don't have to go to bed with me, you know. I don't absolutely insist on it." "Thank you." "I want my champagne." "How much money have you got?" "Altogether? How would I know? About eight million dollars." "I've decided to go to bed with you." "Mercenary," she said. "I paid for the champagne." "The hell with the champagne," she said.Raymond Chandler — The Long Goodbye
Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that’s the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the seaJack Kerouac — The Dharma Bums
She was silent always. She knew then—she knew without having learnt. Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her singleness of mind made her drop plumb like a stone, alight exact as a bird, gave her, naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth which delighted, eased, sustained—falsely perhaps.Virginia Woolf — To the Lighthouse
It’s probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.David Foster Wallace — A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
She came back with the glass and her fingers cold from holding the cold glass touched mine and I held them for a moment and then let them go slowly as you let go of a dream when you wake with the sun in your face and have been in an enchanted valley.Raymond Chandler — Farewell, My Lovely
From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class.Raymond Chandler — The High Window
Hegemony citizens. Perhaps they had found itDan Simmons — Hyperion
He held the trap up and eyed the notch in the pan while he backed off one screw and adjusted the trigger. Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable.Cormac McCarthy — The Crossing
but here, the houses falling away on both sides, they came out on the quay, and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs Ramsay could not help exclaiming, “Oh, how beautiful!” For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.Virginia Woolf — To the Lighthouse
The advent of dawn pierced Roran’s dreams and woke him with a sense of momentous expectation. He stood and tiptoed downstairs, then went outside and stared at the misty mountains, absorbed by the morning’s silence. His breath formed a white plume in the air, but he felt warm, for his heart throbbed with fear and eagerness.Christopher Paolini — Eldest
For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt. When one is writing—really writing—it is as if one is given a fatline to the gods. No true poet has been able to explain the exhilaration one feels when the mind becomes an instrument as surely as does the pen or thought processor, ordering and expressing the revelations flowing in from somewhere else.Dan Simmons — Hyperion
The moonlight lay like a white sheet on the front lawn except under the deodar where there was the thick darkness of black velvet. Lights in two lower windows were lit and in one upstairs room visible from the front. I walked across the stumble stones and rang the bell.Raymond Chandler — The High Window
After a while, after big doses of the Times and the Examiner, you too will whoop it up for the sunny south. You’ll eat hamburgers year after year and live in dusty, vermin-infested apartments and hotels, but every morning you’ll see the mighty sun, the eternal blue of the sky, and the streets will be full of sleek women you never will possess, and the hot semitropical nights will reek of romance you’ll never have, but you’ll still be in paradise, boys, in the land of sunshine.John Fante — Ask the Dust
“Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”Dan Simmons — Hyperion
“She’s a tall handsome blond. Very—very appealing. ” “You mean sexy?” “Well—” she blushed furiously, “in a nice well-bred sort of way, if you know what I mean.” “I know what you mean,” I said, “but I never got anywhere with it.” “I can believe that,” she said tartly.Raymond Chandler — The High Window
NNYC’s harbor’s Liberty Island’s gigantic Lady has the sun for a crown and holds what looks like a huge photo album under one iron arm, and the other arm holds aloft a product. The product is changed each 1 Jan. by brave men with pitons and cranes.David Foster Wallace — Infinite Jest
if a man is in training, when he’s actually training does he pay attention to just anybody’s opinion, whether it’s praise or criticism, or only to one person’s – the person who’s actually a doctor or a trainer? CRITO Only the one person’s. SOCRATES So this man in training should fear the criticisms and welcome the praise that come from this one individual, not those that come from ordinary people.Plato — The Last Days of Socrates
I shudder sometimes to think of all that stellar mystery of how she IS going to get me in a future lifetime, wow—And I seriously do believe that will be my salvation, too. A long way to go.Jack Kerouac — Big Sur
Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and happiness are available.Sam Harris — Waking Up
At Sparta, the legislation of Lyrurgus deprived the man who did not marry of all the rights of citizenship.90Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges — The Ancient City
what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.Albert Camus — the plague
Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH . . . but I ran away from that seashore and never came back again without that secret knowledge: that it didnt want me there, that I was a fool to sit there in the first place, the sea has its waves, the man has his fireside, period.Jack Kerouac — Big Sur
And with every dime you've got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who's working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, any one of whom could then crash Daddy's Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least;Anthony Bourdain — Kitchen Confidential
"Man is an idea, and a precious small idea, once he turns his back on love.Albert Camus — the plague
But when a man has had only four hours' sleep, he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are; that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice, hideous, witless justice. And those others, the men and women under sentence to death, shared his bleak enlightenment. Before the plague he was welcomed as a savior.Albert Camus — the plague
The bride was usually placed upon a car; her face was covered with a veil, and on her head was a crown.Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges — The Ancient City
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.Raymond Chandler — Farewell, My Lovely
Who would build a cabin up there but some bored but hoary old adventurous architect maybe got sick of running for congress and one of these days a big Orson Welles tragedy with screaming ghosts a woman in a white nightgown’ll go flying down that sheer cliff—ButJack Kerouac — Big Sur
a true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time,Sam Harris — Waking Up
I’m convinced that I wrong no one in the world, intentionally,Plato — The Last Days of Socrates
The sour Saskatchewanese kid next to Hal has been making impressive schematic drawings of automatic weaponry in his notebook all semester.David Foster Wallace — Infinite Jest
It was not necessary to have been even a virtuous man: the wicked man, as well as the good man, became a god; but he retained in the second life all the bad inclinations which had tormented him in the first.16Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges — The Ancient City
that it’s not living that should be our first priority, but living well.Plato — The Last Days of Socrates
Show up at work on time six months in a row and we'll talk about red curry paste and lemon grass. Until then, I have four words for you: 'Shut the fuck up.'Anthony Bourdain — Kitchen Confidential
Rieux could see them in the doorways of houses, passionately embracing and gazing hungrily at one another in the failing sunset glow, had got what they wanted, this was because they had asked for the one thing that depended on them solely. And as he turned the corner of the street where Grand and Cottard lived, Rieux was thinking it was only right that those whose desires are limited to man and his humble yet formidable love should enter, if only now and then, into their reward.Albert Camus — the plague
Daily, about eleven, you see a sort of dress parade of youths and girls, who make you realize the frantic desire for life that thrives in the heart of every great calamity. If the epidemic spreads, morals too will broaden, and we may see again the saturnalia of Milan, men and women dancing round the graves.Albert Camus — the plague
He always waited until the last possible second, when you were ready to shave your head, climb a tower and start gunning down strangers,Anthony Bourdain — Kitchen Confidential
“A philanthropist is necessarily an enthusiast; for without enthusiasm what was ever achieved but commonplace?Herman Melville — The Confidence-Man
On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice.Sam Harris — Waking Up
And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words—WeJack Kerouac — Big Sur
I go out on that porch and sit in the old canvas chair and turn my face up to all that mooching going on up there, starmooched firmament, all those stars crying with happy sadness, all that ream and cream of mocky ways with alleyways of lightyears old as Dame Mae Whitty and the hills—I go walking towards Mien Mo mountain in the moon illuminated August night, see gorgeous misty mountains rising the horizon and like saying to me “You dont have to torture your consciousness with endless thinking” so I sit in the sand and look inward and see those old roses of the unborn again—Amazing,Jack Kerouac — Big Sur
But you too, men of the jury, should be of good hope when you think of death, keeping the truth of this one thing in mind: 41d that there is nothing bad that can happen to a good man whether in life or after he has died,Plato — The Last Days of Socrates
And it’s finally only in the woods you get that nostalgia for “cities” at last, you dream of long gray journeys to cities where soft evenings’ll unfold like Paris but never seeing how sickening it will be because of the primordial innocence of health and stillness in the wilds—So I tell myself “Be Wise.”Jack Kerouac — Big Sur
Well, personally, I've seen enough of people who die for an idea. I don't believe in heroism; I know it's easy and I've learned it can be murderous. What interests me is living and dying for what one loves."Albert Camus — the plague
“Best of men, I ask you this: when you’re an Athenian, and so belong to the greatest city, the one with the highest reputation for wisdom and strength, aren’t you ashamed of caring about 29e acquiring the greatest possible amount of money, together with reputation and honours, while not caring about, even sparing a thought for, wisdom and truth, and making your soul as good as possible?”Plato — The Last Days of Socrates