Nicholas > Nicholas's Quotes

“Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“he wanted to discuss his strange compulsion to let people know the worst about himself—this confusion of what was weak and ugly in himself with what was “interesting”
― Richard Yates, Disturbing the Peace: A Novel

“I smell the thanatoid odor of the airplane's cabin, climb aboard, strap myself in. Maybe, Stargell. I think, this time you'll get to use the oxygen they're always promising. Then we'd feel that incandescence, all of us sucking at the yellow mask, staring at one another, our eyes popping with expectation, waiting for the blast of arctic air, the fun-house spin. You'd feel the blood jump then, Jack. That's when you'd know your skin was filled with magic”
― Craig Nova, Incandescence

“I would not go so far as to say that he was a good person … but Boris had his own set of rules and he stuck to them. Unlike everyone else I had met here, he managed to float above his circumstances … It was as if he had imagined every possibility in advance, and therefore he was never surprised by what happened. Inherent in his attitude was a pessimism so deep, so devastating, so fully in tune with the facts, that it actually made him cheerful.”
― Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things

“In the light of after events there seemed to be something monstrous and ominous about that exuberance, something of the spirit that is called fey. At the time it merely crossed a few people's minds that he might possibly be drunk.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much

“Of Bryan, it might be said that he was candid about his wife and uncomplaining. He treated her offhandedly, as he might treat bad weather.”
― James Salter, All That Is

“In the shower he felt it coming again—that old wave of sadness, the one that felt ancient and had been with him since he could remember, an awareness that tragedy loomed somewhere in his future, tragedy as heavy as limestone blocks. As if an angel had told him his future while he was still in the womb, and Jimmy had emerged from the womb with the angel's words planted somewhere in his mind, but faded from his lips.

Jimmy raised his eyes to the shower spray. He said without speaking: I know in my soul I contributed to my child's death. I can feel it. But I don't know how.”
― Dennis Lehane, Mystic River

“The consul sat perfectly still while the enormity of the insult passed not his soul. As if, as if, as if, he were not sober now! Yet there was some illusive subtlety in the impeachment that still escaped him. For he was not sober. No he was not, not at this very moment he wasn't!. But what had that to do with a minute before, or half an hour ago? And what right had Yvonne to assume it, assume either that he was not sober now, or that, far worse, in a day or two he would be sober? And even if he were not sober now, by what fabulous stages, comparable indeed only to the paths and spheres of the Holy Cabbala itself, had he reached this stage again, touched briefly once before this morning, this stage at which alone he could, as she put it, "cope," this precarious stage, so arduous to maintain, of being drunk in which alone he was sober!”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“The unindividualized, shifting mass of everyone else would be a screen, distributed throughout the city, onto which he'd project the movie of his uninterrupted imagination. Because he'd appear to, and be able to pretend he was\, but never actually be a part of the mass, maybe he'd begin to feel a kind of needless intimacy, not unlike being in the same room as a significant other and feeling affection without touching or speaking. An earnest assembling of the backup life he'd sketched and constructed the blueprints and substructures (during the average of six weeks per year, spread throughout his life, that he'd been in Taiwan) would begin, at some point, after which, months and years later, one morning, he would sense the independent organization of a second, itinerant consciousness—lured here by the new, unoccupied structures—toward which he'd begin sending the data of his sensory perception.”
― Tao Lin, Taipei

“Thirteen-year-old Salahuddin, setting aside recent doubts and grievances, entered once again his childish adoration of his father, because he had, had, had worshipped him, he was a great father until you started growing a mind of your own, and then to argue with him was called a betrayal of his love, but never mind that now, I accuse him of becoming my supreme being, so that what happened was like a loss of faith”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And i know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breath in someone's face and fasten the infection on him. What's natural is the microbe. All the rest – health, integrity, purity (if you like) – is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague