cooper > cooper's Quotes

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.

That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No... one... would... care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Then you love it. For if you fear it because it is stronger than you, hate it because you fear it, you love it. For you cannot subject it to yourself. One loves only the things one cannot conquer.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“There are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“No, what’s the use, there’s no leaving a place like this for any amount of freedom, thought the dog sniffing dismally, I’ve got used to it. I’m a gentleman’s dog, an intelligent being, acquired a taste for the good things of life. And what is freedom? Smoke, mirage, fiction... the raving of those unhappy-democrats...”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog

“Disappear here”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“Have you ever wished that you could disappear from all this?”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama

“I don't trust anyone named Gavin.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama

“Maybe everyone in Edo was maintaining an illusion of sanity with clothes and hairpins. Or maybe they all started out as virtuous people but were transformed into monsters when they learned—over and over again—that they could never hold on to what they thought was theirs.”
― Amy Stanley, Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World

“If modern science made possible weapons of unprecedented destructiveness like the machine gun and the bomber, modern politics created a state of unprecedented power, for which a new word, totalitarianism, had to be coined.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“The library is an easy place to be when you have no place you need to go and a desire to be invisible.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It’s like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Radical Christian dominionists have no religious legitimacy. They are manipulating Christianity, and millions of sincere believers, to build a frightening political mass movement with many similarities with other mass movements, from fascism to communism to the ethnic nationalist parties in the former Yugoslavia. It shares with these movements an inability to cope with ambiguity, doubt, and uncertainty. It creates its own "truth". It embraces a world of miracles and signs and removes followers from a rational, reality-based world. It condemns self-criticism and debate as apostasy.”
― Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

“Many yearn to be deceived and directed. It makes life easier to bear.”
― Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

“An enemy combatant can be anyone that the US chooses to attack, with no credible evidence, as Washington concedes.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance

“To describe someone as a “criminal” is both to mark that person with a terrifying permanent character trait and simultaneously to place the person outside the circle of “us.” They are criminals. We make mistakes.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Rectifying unjust inequalities will always bring pain to those who benefited from such injustices. This pain will inevitably be experienced by some as oppression.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Her Royal Highness, the cursed royal bastard, is four cubits high, shaped like a barrel of beer, has a maw which stretches from ear to ear and is full of dagger-like teeth, has red eyes and a red mop of hair! Her paws, with claws like a wild cat's, hang down to the ground! I'm surprised we've yet to send her likeness to friendly courts! The princess, plague choke her, is already fourteen. Time to think of giving her hand to a prince in marriage!”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“And I strongly advise you, witcher, that if the queen orders you to strip naked, paint your arse blue and hang yourself upside down in the entrance hall like a chandelier, you do it without surprise or hesitation.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“I ask everybody here present for forgiveness. With the exception of the noble lady Yennefer, whom I thank, but ask for nothing. Farewell.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Sword of Destiny

“He had watched a rat enter and exit the room by flattening itself like a pancake to squeeze beneath the door; he googled “Can rats flatten themselves?” discovered that they could, and devised a solution to close the gap.”
― Reeves Wiedeman, Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork

“If you read a novel to the end, then it’s over. I would never want to do something as wasteful as that. I’d much rather keep it here with me, safe and sound, forever.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“In years past, I had carefully studied the stems, leaves, and branches and had read the tags that identified the different varieties, but I realized now that I was already unable to remember what this thing called a rose had looked like.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“Time is a great healer. It just flows on all of its own accord.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police