Lee > Lee's Quotes

“There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

“The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell
by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy,
insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“She had opened a door... and now she was walking with demons. And at the end of her travels, she would have her revenge... Pain had made a sadist of her.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“... I started to die 36 hours before I was born, so dying was a way of life for me.”
― Hubert Selby Jr.

“Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there's something inside us that's so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won't be able to stand looking at it. But it's when we're willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel.”
― Hubert Selby Jr.

“Rothman gave me another sharp look, and then he looked down at his desk. 'Lou' he said softly, 'do you know how many days a year an ironworker works? Do you know what his life expectancy is? Did you ever see an old ironworker? Did you ever stop to figure that there's all kinds of dying, but only one way of being dead?”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“It was like being asleep when you were awake and awake when you were asleep. I'd pinch myself, figuratively speaking - I had to keep pinching myself. Then I'd wake up kind of in reverse; I'd go back to the nightmare I had to live in. And everything would be clear and reasonable.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“You’ve got no time at all, but it seems like you’ve got forever. You’ve got nothing to do, but it seems like you’ve got everything.

You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes: and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven’t moved hardly, they’ve hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they’ve measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You’ve got forever, but that’s no time at all.

You’ve got forever; and somehow you can’t do much with it. You’ve got forever; and it’s a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.

You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“It’s—it’s always lightest j-just before the dark.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that, shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ASS.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you now to know with which ear you'll listen.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Sometimes, life is about what happens before death.”
― jennifer lynch

“I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossible. But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy--that is every man's tragedy.”
― Philip Roth

“we need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“I think babies cry when they’re born because they’re born with the knowledge of all the terrible shit that’s gonna happen to them. That’s why I never had kids. Every life is a death sentence. We just forget it later in life, like dreams we lose the second we wake up. Whether we worry about it or not, the shit’s still going to fly. The important thing is we’re here. At least for now.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women