Beth > Beth's Quotes

“Fickt nicht mit dem Raketemensch!”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“The object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that, however it finds you, it finds you under very weird circumstances.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“It appears that some part of Slothrop ran into the AWOL Džabajev one night in the heart of downtown Niederschaumdorf. (Some believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so, there's no telling which of the Zone's present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering. There's supposed to be a last photograph of him on the only record album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock group—seven musicians posed, in the arrogant style of the early Stones, near an old rocket-bomb site, out in the East End, or South of the River. It is spring, and French thyme blossoms in amazing white lacework across the cape of green that now hides and softens the true shape of the old rubble. There is no way to tell which of the faces is Slothrop's: the only printed credit that might apply to him is "Harmonica, kazoo—a friend." But knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea. . . .)”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“I knew he believed in something that none of us ever do anymore. He believed in the nastiest word in the world. He believed in KINDNESS. Please tell me you remember kindness. Please tell me you remember kindness and joy, you cool motherfuckers.”
― Scott McClanahan, Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place

“Canned food is a perversion,' Ignatius said. 'I suspect that it is ultimately very damaging to the soul.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.”
― Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Let the wild rumpus start!”
― Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

“Oh, please don't go—we'll eat you up—we love you so!”
― Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

“Next to music, beer was best.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“LINSCOTT: Well, life certainly treats you fine.
CONNIE: No, Tom. Life and I go Dutch.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Ladies of the Corridor

“Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“ But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“We live in the richest country in the world. There's plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle - the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars - and hundreds of thousands of people who don't get to eat.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Reader, I married him.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Still, I’ve always believed—still do—that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Insanity is contagious.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty percent of the useful work of the world.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“So just because I don’t exist in the sheep man’s world, it doesn’t mean that I don’t exist at all.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Strange Library

“The tricky thing about mazes is that you don't know if you've chosen the right path until the very end. If it turns out you were wrong, it's usually too late to go back and start again. That's the problem with mazes.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Strange Library

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“MEDVIEDENKO
Why do you always wear mourning?

MASHA
I dress in black to match my life. I am unhappy.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull