Duncan > Duncan's Quotes

“If anyone spends almost the whole day in reading...he gradually loses the capacity for thinking...This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them; but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims

“Too many times naked women and death walked side by side.”
― Mickey Spillane, Survival Zero

“Oh, Jesus, it was the loveliest and most terrible thing he'd ever seen; it was the source of the world; and his shame was so immediate that he let the fabric slip back into place after only a second or two.”
― Richard Yates, Cold Spring Harbor

“Surely the man was too old to be her boyfriend - he looked about fifty - but maybe he took a fatherly interest in her; maybe she had come to rely on his plain, straightforward advice in meeting the various uncertainties of her young life.”
― Richard Yates, Cold Spring Harbor

“Suddenly I see the comedy of little men, myself included, who are pitted against a riddle that is as vast and indifferent as the blue sky above us. (pg. 170)”
― Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back

“Telling people to relax is not as aggressive as shooting them, but it's up there.”
― Thomas McGuane, Cloudbursts: New and Collected Stories

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“We live as we dream--alone....”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“A prediction: In coming decades, involuntary euthanasia will be commonplace in Europe, and Gen-Xers' battles to stay alive into old age will be treated with the same cold contempt as they treated the silent screams of the unborn. Millions will be put to sleep like aged and incontinent household pets."
-The Sad Suicide of Admiral Nimitz, Jan. 18, 2002”
― Patrick J. Buchanan

“Americans who look on this cultural revolution as politics-as-usual do not understand it. It means to make an end of the country we love. It cannot be appeased. Its relentless, reckless use of terms like extremist, sexist, racist, homophobe, nativist, xenophobe, fascist, and Nazi testifies to how seriously it takes the struggle and how it views those who resist. To true believers in the revolution, the Right is not just wrong; the Right is evil.”
― Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization

“She said it casually, but it was like a casual stroke with a shiv. (p.140)”
― Lawrence Block, Sinner Man

“Everybody has one thing that gets to him. Women or liquor or gambling or something. The trouble is when you've got more than one vice.”
― Lawrence Block, The Girl with the Long Green Heart

“We touched glasses very solemnly and drank a toast to health and love and money and time to enjoy them.”
― Lawrence Block, The Girl with the Long Green Heart

“I felt as if I could ride the bus through eternity and be happy.”
― Edward Bunker, No Beast So Fierce

“To be a drunk is to be a hero in a sad story.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“Suicide, more than any other form of death makes people indignant, that's why. The life force is all we have, and when people kill themselves, it frightens the survivors.”
― Charles Willeford, Understudy for Death

“It was part of war; men died, more would die, that was past, and what mattered now was the business in hand; those who lived would get on with it. Whatever sorrow was felt, there was no point in talking or brooding about it, much less in making, for form’s sake, a parade of it. Better and healthier to forget it, and look to tomorrow.
The celebrated British stiff upper lip, the resolve to conceal emotion which is not only embarrassing and useless, but harmful, is just plain commons sense”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here: A Harrowing Tale of World War II

“Fortunately for the world my generation didn't suffer from spiritual hypochondria - but then, we couldn't afford it. By modern standards, I'm sure we, like the whole population who endured the war, were ripe for counselling, but we were lucky; there were no counsellors.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here: A Harrowing Tale of World War II

“I was ripe for death and along a road of perils my weakness led me to the confines of the world and of Cimmeria, home of whirlwinds and of darkness.

from Delirium (II), Alchemy of the Wind - Hunger”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

“I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.”
― Roger Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber

“Sometimes I did things for no reason whatsoever except that they were there to do, and it went no further. I drifted into scenes through an open door and happened to stumble through, staying until I leaked out. I had no goals, so I stabbed in the dark figuring I'd strike something solid sooner or later if I didn't die in the process.
(pg. 103)”
― Jan Kerouac, Baby Driver: A Story About Myself

“I got involved in some mad doings at a creperie with an ex-junkie Jesus freak cripple who introduced me to a fifteen-year-old boy that claimed to be a warlock.”
― Jan Kerouac, Baby Driver: A Story About Myself

“Was there any meaning to life or to war, that two men should sit together and jump within seconds of each other and yet never meet on the ground below?”
― David Kenyon Webster, Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich

“Twelve years ago, when I was 10, I played at being a soldier. I walked up the brook behind our house in Bronxville to a junglelike, overgrown field and dug trenches down to water level with my friends. Then, pretending that we were doughboys in France, we assaulted one another with clods of clay and long, dry reeds. We went to the village hall and studied the rust rifles and machine guns that the Legion post had brought home from the First World War and imagined ourselves using them to fight Germans.
But we never seriously thought that we would ever have to do it. The stories we heard later; the Depression veterans with their apple stands on sleety New York street corners; the horrible photographs of dead bodies and mutilated survivors; “Johnny Got His Gun” and the shrill college cries of the Veterans of Future Wars drove the small-boy craving for war so far from our minds that when it finally happened, it seemed absolutely unbelievable. If someone had told a small boy hurling mud balls that he would be throwing hand grenades twelve years later, he would probably have been laughed at. I have always been glad that I could not look into the future.”
― David Kenyon Webster, Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich

“The lure of the front is like an opiate.”
― Richard Tregaskis, Invasion Diary