Edgar > Edgar's Quotes

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“Do you think that love has to be requited to be genuine? On the contrary, it thrives on indifference.”
― Violet Trefusis, Pirates at Play

“Miss Vesper Holly has the digestive talents of a goat and the mind of a chess master. She is familiar with half a dozen languages and can swear fluently in all of them. She understands the use of a slide rule but prefers doing calculations in her head. She does not hesitate to risk life and limb- mine as well as her own. No doubt she has other qualities as yet undiscovered. I hope not.”
― Lloyd Alexander, The Illyrian Adventure

“She smiled at him. It was her special smile. Her please go away you piece of sub-proletarian turd smile.”
― Helen Zahavi, Dirty Weekend

“I am life,’ the girl said.
‘What?’ he said, startled.
‘To you, I am life. What are you, thirty-eight? Forty? What have you learned? Have you done anything? Look at me, look. I’m life and when you’re done with me, some of it rubs off on you. You don’t feel so old now, do you? With me here in the squib beside you.’
Nick said, ‘I’m thirty-four and I don’t feel old. As a matter of fact, sitting here with you makes me feel older, not younger. Nothing is rubbing off.’
‘It will,’ she said.”
― Philip K. Dick, Our Friends From Frolix 8

“These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“These marvels were great and comfortable ones, but in the old England there was a greater still. The weather behaved itself.
In the spring all the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang; in the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed; in the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory; and in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush.”
― T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone

“Because I am still learning to walk and talk, and it is a million times easier to be cynical and wield a sword, than it is to be open-hearted and stand there, holding a balloon and a birthday cake, with the infinite potential to look foolish.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl

“His eyes were like the shoelaces of a harpsichord.”
― Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

“So where'd you park the car, Max?'
'I don't know. I couldn't see over the wheel.'
'That's okay. I think I can smell it.”
― Steve Purcell

“You are like seven of the strangest women I have ever met.”
― Aaron Sorkin, A Few Good Men

“I know I'm American because when I walk into a room something dies.”
― Noor Hindi

“A hot mean and bitchy desert with a naturally formed misanthropic mood seemed to be saying well Loop good buddy, how you want it dished up, scorpion bite, rattlesnake, order anything you see.”
― Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

“All aspiring writers say these things: "I will not compromise and write a best seller!"—as if they could! There may be a few totally faked-up books that sell, but on the whole I believe every writer writes as well as he can.”
― May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

“This apartment, which you no doubt profanely suppose to be the shop of Will Wimble the undertaker --a man whom we know not, and whose plebeian appellation has never before this night thwarted our royal ears --this apartment, I say, is the Dais-Chamber of our Palace, devoted to the councils of our kingdom, and to other sacred and lofty purposes.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, King Pest

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“This shit about being fearless before death ain't got no quality. How could you say you were fearless about leaving the party, even in stir—even franks and rice taste good when you're hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch, it feels good to sleep. It's like a party even in maximum security and who wants to walk out of a party into something that nobody knows anything at all about?”
― John Cheever, Falconer

“I wish writing felt less like revenge on the world.”
― Fiona Alison Duncan, Exquisite Mariposa

“En la ventana estaban los tejados de siempre y el sol nublado de las seis. Me pareció increíble que ese día sin premoniciones ni símbolos fuera el de mi muerte implacable.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“No one really likes Switzerland, except those who prefer cleanliness to life.”
― Trevanian, The Eiger Sanction

“All I could see was a meaningless arrangement of squiggles and dots, symbols and patterns, running on endlessly. Words are such unstable things.”
― Hiroko Oyamada, The Factory

“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Six pints of bitter,” said Ford Prefect to the barman of the Horse and Groom. “And quickly please, the world’s about to end.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“So don't ask me how to catch Jes Grew. Ask Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, your poets, your painters, your musicians, ask them how to catch it. Ask those people who be shaking their tambourines impervious of the ridicule they receive from Black and White Atonists, Europe the ghost rattling its chains down the deserted halls of their brains.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“Let me begin at the beginning," she began.”
― Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game

“Because passion, like crime, does not like everyday order and well-being and every slight undoing of the bourgeois system, every confusion and infestation of the world is welcome to it, because it can unconditionally expect to find its advantage in it.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“Xim havia dimitit i, com que tanmateix era difícil morir-se, havia emprès el camí del costat, el que no passa pel camí ral de la història. Essent una dona, s'havia dit Xim, ningú no pot fer-me responsable de tanta injustícia.”
― Maria Aurèlia Capmany, Quim/Quima

“time doesn’t pass. We pass.”
― Ken Bruen, The Guards