Chuck > Chuck's Quotes

“I respect your right to hold your religious beliefs, and if they help you, I think that's great. I would, however, like to inform you that you are a raving kook.”
― Scott Dikkers, You Are Worthless: Depressing Nuggets of Wisdom Sure to Ruin Your Day

“How hideous is the semicolon.”
― Samuel Beckett

“She gave me a pledge card, a card promising an annual gift of $5, $10, or $25 toward the support of the Unity mission. I filled it out under the hot light of the projector. The name and address spaces were much too short, unless you wrote a very fine hand or unless your name was Ed Poe and you lived at 1 Elm St.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“Do they pay you by the hour or what? Norwood said to the monocled peanut face.”
― Charles Portis, Norwood

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Reality is not always probable, or likely.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future."
-- Essay: "Kafka and his Precursors”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

“The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

“Stop!' I cried imploringly to my god-like mind.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?"

"That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant.

I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
― Saul Bellow

“I can't go on, I'll go on.”
― Samuel Beckett, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader

“That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“...no animal likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck.”
― Nicholson Baker

“I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

“A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

“I hadn't the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“As for Gussie Finknottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming on sight.”
― Wodehouse

“God is silent. Now if only man would shut up.”
― Woody Allen

“If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.”
― Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters

“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
― Woody Allen

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
― Woody Allen

“Babcock knew no Southerners personally but he had seen them in court often enough...and Ed's manner and appearance said Dixie to him. He imagined Ed at home with his family, a big one, from old geezers to toddlers. He saw them eating their yams and pralines and playing their fiddles and dancing their jigs and guffawing over coarse jokes and beating one another to death with agricultural implements.”
― charles portis, Masters of Atlantis