"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love."
— Carl Sandburg (Chicago Poems)

"you son of a bitch, she said, I am
trying to build a meaningful
relationship.

you can't build it with a hammer,
he said."
— Charles Bukowski (Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit)

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

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

"the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness."
— Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation)

""Eva, can I pose as Aesop in a cave?"
"No, Don.""
— Jon Agee (Palindromania!)

""I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."
"Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.""
— Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
— G.K. Chesterton (Alarms and Discursions)

"Unbeing dead isn't being alive."
— e.e. cummings

"If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat."
— Douglas Adams

"It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct."
— Michio Kaku (Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension)

"Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.
But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten."
— Terry Pratchett (Mort)