These are my favorite quotes…someday I hope to be just as literary, snotty and bitchy as they are remembered…combined.
Here we go…
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
-Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
And the telephones ring. And everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that try to penetrate before the last card is dealt and the days are over. ‘Try to penetrate,’ for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps–who knows?– we might talk by the way.
-Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
I alone have the key of this wild circus
-Arthur Rimbaud, Circus
all I want to do/ is make poetry famous/ all I want to do is/ burn my initials into the sun/ all I want to do is/ read poetry from the middle of a/ burning building/ standing in the fast lane of the/ freeway/ falling from the top of the/ Empire State Building…I want people to hear my poetry and/ weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,/ eat their television sets, beat each other to death with/ swords and/ go out and get riotously drunk on/ someone else’s money…I come not to bury poetry/ but to blow it up/ not to dandle it on my knee/ like a retarded child with/ beautiful eyes/ but/ throw it off a cliff and/ see if the motherfucker can/ swim for its life.
-David Lerner, Mien Kampf
For twenty years they diligently thought up new ways to belittle in sickness and in health, then one day they got into a battle and knocked each other out, peacefully crumpled unconscious and bruised on the floor, dreaming of the morning when kindness would be the only thing left to give.
-Eric Brown, You Fucking Cunt
As he drifted towards sleep, Baal surveyed his own uselessness, his failed art. Now that he had abdicated all public platforms, his verses were full of loss: of youth, beauty, love, health, innocence, purpose, energy, certainty, hope. Loss of knowledge. Loss of money.
-Salman Rushie, The Satanic Verses
Civilization is a careful construction for the production and distribution of alcohol.
-Tibor Fisher, Top Ten Philosophical Hints
The only way
I know how
to wash dishes
is by
smashing them against
the wall!
-Pedro Pietri
For it was not until his body was appeased that he could come alive in his mind…And life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word.
-Samuel Beckett, Murphy
Sometimes you see a kite so high, so wise it almost knows the wind. It travels, then chooses to land in one spot and no other and no matter how you yank, run this way or that, it will simply break its cord, seek its resting place and bring you, blood-mouthed, running.
-Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Say to a blind man, you're free, open the door that was separating him from the world, Go, you are free, we tell him once more, and he does not go, he has remained motionless there in the middle of the road, he and the others, they are terrified…
-Jose Saramago, Blindness
HEADLINE: I AM NOT TRYING TO SCREW YOU
I AM TRYING TO COMMUNICATE
(this will be taken our of context) or as the
latest 18 yr old abortion on the scene sucking up
beers faster than Zorro could circumcise a bad ass
or whip a masochist in a gay bar CRACK–
she sed it wasn’t the dusting & cleaning; It was the
furniture polish they used that brought her down
& WHAT THEY FORGOT TO TELL HER CUNT
was another hour & then under the table & then
HANNA PAVILLION & then she sed it was when I
was 16 & dreams–mist-electric love for a fatherless
fathers eye–no one seemed to understand–I didn’t
want an icebox in my bedroom–I wanted Someone to
Say HEY YOU
-da levy, Cleveland, The Rectal Eye Visions
Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
-Sir Ralph Richardson
And finally..
I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph
-Ken Kesey