Favorite Quotes

[Zens7s]

For a long time I have kept a journal of my favorite passages from books. As Karma can attest, I also have a bad habit of underlining in books, which makes reading them after me rather wierd and insightful into my perverse mind.

So what are your favorite passages? Feel free to say why, or just let em fly.

[psax]

Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.

[FanGirl]

Except from "If Chins Could Kill: Confession of a B Movie Actor" by Bruce Campbell:

"Sam was seated behind me in Radio Speech and one of his favorite pastimes was to inflict torture without getting caught. He'd lie in wait, until Mr. Moll called on me to answer a question. As I began to speak, Sam would places a sharpened pencil into the square of my back and apply pressure, testing to see how long I could speak normally. Afterward, when I threatened to stab his eyes out, he'd come out with, "What I tried to help you," utterly convinced of his innocence."

Bruce talking about going to high school with Sam Raimi.

[phit_demon]

"If Chins Could Kill: Confession of a B Movie Actor" by Bruce Campbell
I adored that book, with a particular mention to the forward where Sam and Ivan Raimi are "caught" on tape...

[Sheriff]

Opening paragraph to Tales of Ordinary Madness.

Duke had this daughter, Lala, they named her, she was 4. it was his first child and he had always been careful not to have children, fearing that they would murder him somehow, but now he was insane and she delighted him, she knew everything that Duke was thinking, there was that line that ran from her to him, from him to her.

[JaimePaulFalcon]

Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish— a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow— to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested...
Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.

* Gonzo Papers, Vol. 2: Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (1988)

[Sheriff]

psax, I love that book (and line), it was the reason I read The Brothers Karamozov, the passage that includes the title is also one of my favorites.

[jjcourtright]

I once had a professor named Dimitri. He was Russian. Him and all of his brothers were named after the Brothers Karamozov.

[JK]

I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

-JRR Tolkein; The Lord of the Rings: TheFellowship of the Ring

[Zens7s]

"I think of you and me as the doomed lovers we never were. We walk in some autumn's continual rain in my dream, and grasp at one another, as though each moment was the moment of parting, drinking in every feature, every change of expression.

Each thing becomes the last, and we wander down deserted streets, without touching, and are aliens wherever we go. Life is a perpetual defeat for us. We found each other reluctantly, allowing ourselves passion at the expense of sadness, opened to each other only out of irony.

We said goodbye when we met the first secret time. We have no eagerness, no ecstacy, only the likeness of this sense of defeat. We come together rarely and then like two infected lovers in some contagious ruin, we lie down together only so that we might die warm. Each stolen moment is like a withering rose caught at the supurb beauty of its decline, death already dreadfully kissing it...

...This is what I am thinking these days: of doomed lovers (you so rare and dark beside me), living a trapped life in a city set for destruction. How many beds will we get into tonight apart, how many silences endure and how much longing will remain sweet and prisoned in our limbs without escape! Doomed lovers in buildings that will be ruins!

Just part of my dream of you these days..."

- "Go" John Clellon Holmes

[By-tor]

"we wander down deserted streets, without touching

We have no eagerness, no ecstacy, only the likeness of this sense of defeat. We come together rarely..."

- "Go" John Clellon HolmesI'm obviously thinking of some other guy.

[Zens7s]

I'm obviously thinking of some other guy.
I am not personally. The first time I read that it struck me how some relationships are based on things that are so profoundly sad and dysfunctional. I guess, to a small point, I have been the other party in a relationship like this, where each time you see them should and could really be the last. These types of relationships suck.

[By-tor]

I am not personally. The first time I read that it struck me how some relationships are based on things that are so profoundly sad and dysfunctional. I guess, to a small point, I have been the other party in a relationship like this, where each time you see them should and could really be the last. These types of relationships suck.Damn, Zens, I was talking about a guy with one of the biggest shlongs ever, and you go all misty on me. ;)

[Zens7s]

Damn, Zens, I was talking about a guy with one of the biggest shlongs ever, and you go all misty on me. ;)
God, you really are dirty minded. You got that out of that? [Head shakes] The other John Holmes.

[Ismael]

“Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity—I belong to the earth! I say that laying on my pillow and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples. I can see about me all those cracked forebears of mine dancing around the bed, consoling me, egging me on, lashing me with their serpent tongues, grinning and leering at me with their skulking skulls. I am inhuman! I say it with a mad, halluninated grin, and I will keep on saying it though it rain crocodiles. Behind my words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lockjaw, some grinning with the grimace of a grin, foretaste and aftermath of what is always going on. Clearer than all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement. And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert slag they breed a song that contaminates. I see this other race of individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals. I see that when they tear their hair with the effort to comprehend, to seize this forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed beasts and rip and gore, I see that this is right, that there is no path to pursue. A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicating, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness.”
-Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

[Zens7s]

Good call on Henry Miller. My favorite quote from Tropic of Cancer is

Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions.

[By-tor]

God, you really are dirty minded. You got that out of that? [Head shakes] The other John Holmes.Good gawd, almighty, girl! Most men on the planet that see the words "John Holmes", even with a "Clellon" 'tween 'em, think donkey dick.

I tear up when I hear the national anthem at any kind of event. I cried hearing about the autistic kid(regularly the team "manager") that scored 20 points in the last 4 minutes of the last high school basketball game of the season, that he shouldn't have even been "dressed-out" for.

But, I see the words "John Holmes", and....uh..hold on I gottta go checkout the Vivid website for a few minutes....

[Psyche]

i have a few from jarhead (the book not the movie)

"The man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war, and afterward he turns his rifle in at the armory and believes he's finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands - love a woman, build a house, change his son's diaper - his hands remember the rifle and the power the rifle proffered. The cold weight, the buttstock in the shoulder, the sexy slope and fall of the trigger guard."

"To be a marine, a true marine, you must kill. With all of your training, all of your expertise, if you don't kill, you're not a combatant, even if you've been fired at, and so you are not yet a marine: receiving fire is easy - you've either made a mistake or the enemy is better, and now you are either lucky or dead but not a combatant.

I have gone to war and now I can issue my complaint. I can sit on my porch and complain all day. And you must listen. Some of you will say to me: You signed the contract, you crying bitch, and you fought in a war because of your signature, no one held a gun to your head. This is true, but because I signed the contract and fulfilled my obligation to fight one of America's wars, I am entitled to speak, to say, I belonged to a fucked situation. "

"I'm a soldier, in a "conflict." A "conflict" is much easier for the American public to swallow than a war. War still has that messy Vietnam feeling - the Vietnam War was not an official war either, but a perpetually escalating conflict with many poor, dead, sad fuckers.

"Welcome to the motherfucker."

... Honey, the war started today, but you already know this, you probably knew before I did"


and then i have a few from battle royale (yes i know i'm going through a very violent phase in my life so i quote from a very violent book)

"The thing people fear most isn't dying, it's being forgotten"

and you have to really read the book to get why this bruce springstein quote is memorable

"but tramps like us..baby we were born to run"

[TLS]

"For me, counting and touching things and repeating words are all the same activity. Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain - same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you've ever been it you know the answer." -Lionel

That is from a book I read a while ago called Motherless Brooklyn. It's by Jonathan Lethem. I was excited to find out that Ed Norton is involved with a movie based on this book. It'd be fun to see it happen.

[Zens7s]

"For me, counting and touching things and repeating words are all the same activity. Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain - same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you've ever been it you know the answer." -Lionel

That is from a book I read a while ago called Motherless Brooklyn. It's by Jonathan Lethem. I was excited to find out that Ed Norton is involved with a movie based on this book. It'd be fun to see it happen.
I work with a guy who has Torettes, but his manifests itself as this really disgusting throat clearing thing with a face twitch.

My quote for the day:

A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there's less of you.
-Margaret Atwood "Surfacing"

[Sheriff]

Hah, for some reason I remembered this quote and tried using it in a converstion but forgot who wrote the book. Needless to say the quote was almost correct but not being able to remember the author led to an ackward situation. I re-read 2 books before I found it:

Later, I asked the falconer why he had set his bird up for certain failure.
"I want her to learn that she has to take a higher pitch," he said. "If she was over the pond, it would have been a simple slaughter."
And I understood that falconers require a certain perverse elegance in their sport. They are rather like the sexually obsessed in this regard: "Well, if I can't do it with whips and midgets, I'd rather not do it at all."


- Tim Cahill, Pecked to Death by Ducks

[By-tor]

http://img.citypages.com/imagebank/articles/26_1303/26_1303a13898_p.jpg

[BOP TILL U DROP]

oh my gosh....the falconer.

[Antonio_Bay]

- Tim Cahill, Pecked to Death by Ducks

He plays for Everton FC now. I have him in my dream team.

http://www.4thegame.com/media/00/03/50/tim_cahill.jpg

I was going to replace him for next weeks games, but I see this as a sign he'll do well. * crosses fingers. and legs. *

[JamesArthur]

Robert Jordan Book something. "They gloried in what they were."

[BOP TILL U DROP]

He plays for Everton FC now. I have him in my dream team.

http://www.4thegame.com/media/00/03/50/tim_cahill.jpg

I was going to replace him for next weeks games, but I see this as a sign he'll do well. * crosses fingers. and legs. *

hey, its slater!
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj130/bopxtilxuxdrop/73929543.jpg

++edit++

sorry. that was kinda racist.