Jared > Jared's Quotes

“A pissant is somebody who thinks he’s so damn smart, he can never keep his mouth shut. No matter what anybody says, he’s got to argue with it. You say you like something, and, by God, he’ll tell you why you’re wrong to like it. A pissant does his best to make you feel like a boob all the time. No matter what you say, he knows better.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I looked at the faces around me and I knew mine was like theirs. Faces with the blood drained away, tight faces, worried, lost. Faces like flowers torn from their roots and stuffed into a pretty vase, the colours draining fast. I had to get away from that town.”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“Are the dead restored? The books say no, the night shouts yes”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“But, I have to smile, for the salt of the sea is in my blood, and there may be ten thousand roads over the land, but they shall never confuse me, for my heart's blood will ever return to its beautiful source.”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“Ah Camilla, you lost girl! Open your long fingers and give me back my tired soul! Kiss me with your mouth because I hunger for the bread of a Mexican hill. Breathe the fragrance of lost cities into fevered nostrils, and let me die here, my hand upon the soft contour of your throat, so like the whiteness of some half-forgotten southern shore. Take the longing in these restless eyes and feed it to lonely swallows cruising an Autumn cornfield, because I love you Camilla, and your name is sacred like that of some brave princess who died with a smile for a love that was never returned.”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from Earth but to set up Heaven on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Keep it, keep it!" I answered. "You are very welcome to it! It is only a couple of small things, doesn't amount to anything—about everything I own in the world.”
― Knut Hamsun, Hunger

“Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Wounded by the fatal lances of his own nostalgia and that of others, he admired the persistence of the spider webs on the dead rose bushes, the perseverance of the rye grass, the patience of the air in the radiant February dawn.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“It is better to burn than to disappear.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."
Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“They sat there for a long time. They sat on their folded blankets and watched the road in both directions. No wind. Nothing. After a while the boy said: There's not any crows. Are there? No.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Quoth Mandarax:
Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.
—Samuel Butler (1612-1680)”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Galápagos

“I have paid in full my debt to society or whatever.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Galápagos

“If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“How were we to know we were happy?”
― Margaret Atwood

“We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“They've done it before and they'll do it again and when they do it -- seems that only the children weep. Good night.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird