Murdoch Harris > Murdoch's Quotes

“He then thanked everyone genuinely for the party &, the bottle emptied, nodded off.
"oh,christ, look! Leon soon cried "Look at Jim!" Leon leaped from his seat. Slumped unconscious in his chair, Jim had managed to extract his penis from his pants & was pissing on the rug.
"jesus!" Bill rushed across the room, grabbed a large crystal goblet & held it under the stream.
To his surprise Jim filled it.
Bill took another goblet from the table & Jim filled that, too, then a third one.
Leon, Frank, Kathy, & Cheri were falling down with laughter.
Afterward, Frank & Kathy took Jim to the Doors' office & dropped him, still asleep on the office couch.”
― Jerry Hopkins, Daniel Sugerman

“Prescott's life was changed from the accepted norm of a proper Bostonian by that crust of bread. While in his junior year at Harvard,the students one day,while eating in the Commons, turned the room into pandemonium by bombarding each other with food;in the midst of it Prescott, who turned at the call of his name, was struck by a crust of bread accurately thrown. It hit him in the open left eye,striking the unprotected pupil;it had the effect usually attending a brain concussion. When he recovered he was made instantly aware that he had lost sight of his left eye.”
― Victor W. von Hagen

“Well, sir to say that when the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth, is to make the assumption, usually justified, that everything that is to be considered has indeed been considered. Let us suppose we have considered ten factors. Nine are clearly impossible. Is the tenth, however improbable, therefore true? What if there were an eleventh factor, and a twelfth, & a thirteenth...”
― Isaac Asimov

“Shackleton's unwillingness to succumb to the demands of everyday life & his insatiable excitement w/ unrealistic ventures left him open to the accusation of being basically immature & irresponsible. & very possibly he was-by conventional standards. But the great leaders of historical record-the Napoleons, the Nelsons, the Alexanders-have rarely fitted any conventional mold, & it is perhaps an injustice to evaluate them in ordinary terms. There can be little doubt that Shackleton, in this way, was an extraordinary leader of men.”
― Alfred Lansing

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

“I want to stand 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.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside while still alive. Never surrender.”
― Tupac Shakur

“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The Death-Bed Edition

“I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Anger as soon as fed is dead-
'Tis starving makes it fat. ”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems

“Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is the fear of failure.”
― Jack Lemmon

“It’s hard enough to write a good drama, it’s much harder to write a good comedy, and it’s hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.”
― Jack Lemmon

“There is no one right way to live.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

“But why? Why do you need prophets to tell you how you ought to live? Why do you need anyone to tell you how you ought to live”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

“I have amazing news for you. Man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“Anything that happens, happens.

Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.

Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.

It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“In the winter time the temperature falls well below the legal minimum.”
― Douglas Adams

“NO ADMITTANCE.
NOT EVEN TO AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.
YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE.
GO AWAY.”
― Douglas Adams

“Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“with that sort of gigantic delicacy of an elephant picking up a peanut.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact,”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“that adult trait of being convinced of anything by an assumption of silent superiority”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Man the sum of his climatic experiences”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Versh told me about a man who mutilated himself. He went into the woods and did it with a razor, sitting in a ditch. A broken razor flinging them backward over his shoulder the same motion complete the jerked skein of blood backward not looping. But that’s not it. It’s not not having them. It’s never to have had them then I could say O That That’s Chinese I dont know Chinese. And Father said it’s because you are a virgin: dont you see? Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“To hell with your money
No no come on I belong to the family now see I know how it is with a young fellow he has lots of private affairs it's always pretty hard to get the old man to stump up for I know haven't I been there and not so long ago either but now I'm getting married and all specially up there come on don't be a fool listen when we get a chance for a real talk I want to tell you about a little widow over in town
I've heard that too keep your damned money
Call it a loan then just shut your eyes a minute and you'll be fifty
Keep your hands off of me you'd better get that cigar off the mantel”
― William Faulkner

“I says to myself it's a good thing her eyes are giving out,”
― William Faulkner

“He sho a preacher, mon! He didn't look like much at first, but hush!”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Shirts. I thought all the time they were khaki, army issue khaki, until I saw they were of heavy Chinese silk or finest flannel because they made his face so brown his eyes so blue. Dalton Ames. It just missed gentility. Theatrical fixture. Just papier-mache, then touch. Oh. Asbestos. Not quite bronze.”
― William Faulkner