"Dying shouldl come easy:
like a freight train you
don't hear when
your back is
turned."
— Charles Bukowski (The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain: New Poems)

"The first draft of anything is shit."
— Ernest Hemingway

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)

"For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so."
— Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea)

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."
— Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis)

"He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Clean Well Lighted Place)

" Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his
sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;
or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping
her shadow off a wall....

Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’
tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips
in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given
to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which
saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in
vanity....

Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,
whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man
who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for
dessert served himself a chilled fedora.... "
— Russell Edson

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. "
— Charles Bukowski

"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."
— Charles Bukowski

"I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year."
— Charles Bukowski (Women: A Novel)

"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"
— Gertrude Stein

""You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night."
— James Thurber (Selected Letters of James Thurber)

"You are all a lost generation."
— Gertrude Stein

"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)