Fleming Slone > Fleming's Quotes

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“My life is nothing but room for you...It could never be filled by anyone but you.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“I don't know what's going on...and I'm probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we're being tested somehow, by somebody or some thing a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it's over.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“You think I'm insane?" said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him.
"You're still in touch. I guess that's the test."
"Barely — barely."
"A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany."
Finnerty shook his head. "He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." He nodded, "Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“Thinking the guy up ahead knows what he's doing is the most dangerous religion there is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, and then happiness as we can manage it.... Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, but your work is first, learning first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“I don't want to care. If I care about things, it'll just be worse, it'll just be another thing to worry about. It's less painful if I don't care.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“And as the elevator descends, passing the second floor, and the first floor, going even farther down, I realize that the money doesn't matter. That all that does is that I want to see the worst.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“Mountains are not Stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.”
― Anatoli Boukreev

“What rioters, out of control, are really protesting about is life itself. Most people do not like it, it's humiliating for almost everyone.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“In a threatening situation it is natural to mobilize psychic energy, draw it inward, and use it as a defense against the threat. But this innate reaction more often than not compromises the ability to cope. It exacerbates the experience of inner turmoil, reduces the flexibility of response, and, perhaps worse than anything else, it isolates a person from the rest of the world, leaving him alone with his frustrations. On the other hand, if one continues to stay in touch with what is going on, new possibilities are likely to emerge, which in turn might suggest new responses, and one is less likely to be entirely cut off from the stream of life.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“You can't brace yourself for famine if you've never known hunger.”
― David Sedaris

“I used to watch the line where earth and sky met, and longed to go and seek there the key of all mysteries, thinking that I might find there a new life, perhaps some great city where life should be grander and richer—and then it struck me that life may be grand enough even in a prison.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“One of the vilest and most hateful things connected with money is that it can buy even talent; and will do so as long as the world lasts.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“He wanted to diminish the surface he offered the world, to sleep until everything was consumed.”
― Albert Camus

“Living this way, in his own presence, time took on its most extreme dimensions, and each hour seemed to contain a world.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death