Lewis Lacook > Lewis's Quotes

“Send the pick to a lop state. Whale ace. Sneezers.”
― Clark Coolidge

“Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Hello sheriff, give me another nose”
― Clark Coolidge

“--and then you're in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it's the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it's you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you, and the puke-, drool- and Substance-crusted T-shirt you've both worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest's center and centerless eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see you've been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land in. You see now that It's your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It's gotten you into is undeniable and you still can't stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can't stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“... That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

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

“Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent...

...Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot. - Red roses.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it. - A substance in a cushion”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“A piece of crystal. A change, in a change that is remarkable there is no reason to say that there was a time.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“When is there some discharge when. There never is.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“A light white, a disgras, an ink spot, a rosy charm.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“Asparagus in a lean in a lean is to hot. This makes it art and it is wet weather wet weather wet”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“A virgin a whole virgin is judged made and so between curves and outlines and real seasons and more out glasses and a perfectly unprecedented arrangement between old ladies and mild colds there is no satin wood shining.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“A FEATHER.

A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.”
― Lester Bangs

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus

“We are always the same age inside. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“One must dare to be happy. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
― Gertrude Stein