Art > Art's Quotes

“To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.”
― E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

“Did I ever tell you about the man
who taught his asshole to talk?

His whole abdomen would move up and down,
you dig, farting out the words.

It was unlike anything I ever heard.

Bubbly, thick, stagnant sound.

A sound you could smell.

This man worked for the carnival,you dig?

And to start with it was
like a novelty ventriloquist act.

After a while,
the ass started talking on its own.

He would go in
without anything prepared...

and his ass would ad-lib
and toss the gags back at him every time.

Then it developed sort of teethlike...

little raspy incurving hooks
and started eating.

He thought this was cute at first
and built an act around it...

but the asshole would eat its way through
his pants and start talking on the street...

shouting out it wanted equal rights.

It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags.
Nobody loved it.

And it wanted to be kissed,
same as any other mouth.

Finally, it talked all the time,
day and night.

You could hear him for blocks,
screaming at it to shut up...

beating at it with his fists...

and sticking candles up it, but...

nothing did any good,
and the asshole said to him...

"It is you who will shut up
in the end, not me...

"because we don't need you
around here anymore.

I can talk and eat and shit."

After that, he began waking up
in the morning with transparentjelly...

like a tadpole's tail
all over his mouth.

He would tear it off his mouth
and the pieces would stick to his hands...

like burning gasoline jelly
and grow there.

So, finally, his mouth sealed over...

and the whole head...

would have amputated spontaneously
except for the eyes, you dig?

That's the one thing
that the asshole couldn't do was see.

It needed the eyes.

Nerve connections were blocked...

and infiltrated and atrophied.

So, the brain couldn't
give orders anymore.

It was trapped inside the skull...

sealed off.

For a while, you could see...

the silent, helpless suffering
of the brain behind the eyes.

And then finally
the brain must have died...

because the eyes went out...

and there was no more feeling in them
than a crab's eye at the end of a stalk.”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Do you really want to be happy? You can begin by being appreciative of who you are and what you've got.”
― Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

“Lots of people talk to animals...Not very many listen though...that's the problem.”
― A.A. Milne

“The surest way to become Tense, Awkward, and Confused is to develop a mind that tries too hard - one that thinks too much.”
― Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Four legs good, two legs bad.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“- You know what this is?
- Nope
- It's a bowel disruptor. And you are just full of shit.”
― Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street

“Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.”
― Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street

“...You people don't know what the truth is! It's there, just under their bullshit, but you never look! That's what I hate most about this fucking city-- LIES ARE NEWS AND TRUTH IS OBSOLETE!”
― Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan, Vol. 2: Lust for Life

“Tradition:' one of those words conservative people use as a shortcut to thinking.”
― Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan, Vol. 4: The New Scum

“Did you ever want to set someone's head on fire, just to see what it looked like? Did you ever stand in the street and think to yourself, I could make that nun go blind just by giving her a kiss? Did you ever lay out plans for stitching babies and stray cats into a Perfect New Human? Did you ever stand naked surrounded by people who want your gleaming sperm, squirting frankincense, soma and testosterone from every pore? If so, then you're the bastard who stole my drugs Friday night. And I'll find you. Oh, yes.”
― Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan, Vol. 5: Lonely City

“Listen to the Chair Leg of Truth! It does not lie!”
― Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan, Vol. 9: The Cure

“My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.”
― David Simon