Jonny Illuminati > Jonny's Quotes

“There are many who would like my time. I shun them. There are some who share my time. I am entertained by them. There are precious few who contribute to my time. I cherish them.”
― Anton LaVey

“I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
and perhaps it will be pleasing to have remembered these things one day”
― Virgil, Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid, Books 1–6

“He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers' night club, where the drunken Anzac major who had brought her there had been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company of some singing comrades at the bar.
"All right, I'll dance with you," she said, before Yossarian could even speak. "But I won't let you sleep with me."
"Who asked you?" Yossarian asked her.
"You don't want to sleep with me?" she exclaimed with surprise.
"I don't want to dance with you.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings/ and you say I'll give you anything but you never come through.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
                                                                                and dress them in warm clothes again.
          How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
                    It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
          it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
                              how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
                                                                                                                        to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
          we're inconsolable.
                                                            Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
                                                                                          Tell me we’ll never get used to it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
                    but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
                                                                        but then he’s still left with his hands.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway. You’re in eighth grade. You know these things. You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do long division, and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn't do, because you are weak and hollow and it doesn't matter anymore.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Franz Kafka is Dead

He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. They put their arms around each other, and touched their children's hair. They took off their hats and raised them to the small, sickly man with the ears of a strange animal, sitting in his black velvet suit in the dark tree. Then they turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees , Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. It all caught in the delicate pointed shells of his ears and rolled like pinballs through the great hall of his mind.

That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice. One child, the smallest, shrieked out in delight and her cry tore through the silence and exploded the ice of a giant oak tree. The world shone.

They found him frozen on the ground like a bird. It's said that when they put their ears to the shell of his ears, they could hear themselves.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Oh, I will be cruel to you, Marya Morevna. It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be. But you understand, don’t you? You are clever enough. I am a demanding creature. I am selfish and cruel and extremely unreasonable. But I am your servant. When you starve I will feed you; when you are sick I will tend you. I crawl at your feet; for before your love, your kisses, I am debased. For you alone I will be weak.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“I mean, I had my turtle Deckard, but his lifestyle consisted of sunbathing, eating goldfish, and—somehow I just knew this—silently judging me while I masturbated. I’d taken to covering his tank with a thin blanket, but still…he knew.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“I considered sex work, but then I bent over and looked at my asshole in a mirror. Nobody was going to pay me for access to that thing.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“The standard freak show chic bullshit which had beset the generation after mine thanks to a string of wildly successful reality shows centering on competitive body modification. I’d had fun watching Manual Mutants and Oddfellas when they first started, but then The League of Zeroes came along and made things too grotesque. They lost me when Rectal Rachelle died on the table during her ass-neck implant surgery.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“No one chooses to become a banker. It just happens, like cancer, and then you try to live with it for as long as you can. After thirteen years in the industry, I was damn near terminal. With each step up the corporate ladder I received a slightly smaller laptop, a slightly-harder-to-adjust office chair. To compensate they offered free donuts and coffee cards. Weekends off. 401K vesting. Medical insurance that I had to have because they were turning me into a half-blind hunchback with diabetes. The”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“I used to believe there was a part of the human brain we couldn’t quite excise, and its sole purpose was to encourage self-destruction. Someday, I thought, the guys working on the BRAIN Initiative would push aside a contour in the gray matter and find a pulsing, jet-black spot. They’d insert a probe into the patient’s head to press the nodule and the patient’s immediate response would be to shout out, “FUCK IT! WHY NOT?”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“Exactly how long can you stand on a street corner showing two drug dealers your scar-tissue-induced radical penis curvature? The answer is twelve seconds. After that it feels weird.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“That really your kind of crowd? These effete psychos who want to relive the seedier aspects of the Roman empire?

These are the kind of folks who own tropical islands. Hell, some of them run banana republics for fun. They want a spectacle, I can fill the bill.

Ah yes. Dictators, inbred nobility and other megalomaniacs. Swell friends you got there.

It's a living.”
― Laird Barron, The Light is the Darkness

“Robert Service once said dying is easy, it’s the keeping on living that’s hard, and of course the poet was on the money, as poets usually are when it comes to smugly self-evident affirmations.”
― Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

“Mac, are we having an adventure? Is someone going to shoot at me? Am I going to be kidnapped again? Locked in a trunk and dropped into the sea? Experimented on with growth hormones? Chased by a lunatic in a mechanical werewolf getup? It sure feels like we’re having an adventure.”
“Yep, we’re having an adventure,” Mac said.”
― Laird Barron, X's For Eyes

“There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“He turns off the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“...class is more than income - it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.

It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.

The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself.

In reality, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.”
― Susanna Kaysen