Scott Adelson > Scott's Quotes

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“One should read Borges more.”
― Roberto Bolaño

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them -”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.”
― Keith Richards, Keith Richards: In His Own Words

“[John] Belushi was an extreme experience even by my standards.”
― Keith Richards, Life

“God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they are thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there- and all the time they’ll get there any way, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end”
― Jack Kerouac

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
― David Foster Wallace

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”
― David Foster Wallace

“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”
― Bob Marley

“The reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Gabriel García Márquez: a Life

“There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Christian Religion: An Enquiry

“Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”
― Euripedes

“So I ended up being an anarchist. I was the only anarchist I knew and thank god, because otherwise I would have stopped being an anarchist. Unanimity pisses me off immensely.”
― Roberto Bolaño