Alan > Alan's Quotes

“Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… . And one fine morning ——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Branch is stuck all right. He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century. [...] There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“The fifth act, entirely an anticlimax, is taken up by the bloodbath Gennaro visits on the court of Squamuglia. Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including a lye pit, land mines, a trained falcon with envenom'd talons, is employed. It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“When the slugs begin to talk there's no time to lose.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“An assistant closed the heavy door on the lobby windows and the sun. She heard a lock snap shut; the sound echoed a moment. Passerine spread his arms in a gesture that seemed to belong to the priesthood of some remote culture; perhaps to a descending angel. The auctioneer cleared his throat. Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“How it is I know not, but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other, and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg – a cosy, loving pair.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Ich komme gerade von einem ungleichen Zweikampf auf Messer und Knochensäge, – große Sache, wissen Sie, Rippenresektion. Früher blieben fünfzig Prozent dabei auf dem Tisch des Hauses. Jetzt haben wir's besser 'raus, aber öfters muß man doch mortis causa vorzeitig einpacken. Na, der von heute konnte ja Spaß verstehen, blieb für den Augenblick ganz stramm bei der Stange... Doll, so ein Menschenthorax, der keiner mehr ist. Weichteil, wissen Sie, unkleidsam, leichte Trübung der Idee, sozusagen. Na, und Sie? Was macht die werte Befindität? Ist wohl ein fidelerer Lebenswandel zu zweien, was, Ziemßen, alter Schlauberger? Warum weinen Sie denn, Sie Vergnügungsreisender?", wandte er sich auf einmal an Hans Castorp. "Öffentliches Weinen ist hier nicht erlaubt. Hausordnungsverbot. Da könnte jeder kommen.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“John – tell me, are we lost?”
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible

“He thought there could be deathships out there yet, drifting with their lolling rags of sail. Or life in the deep. Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness. Shuttling past like trains, eyes the size of saucers. And perhaps beyond those shrouded wells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all.

- The Internationale”
― Billy Bragg, A Lover Sings: Selected Lyrics