Tom > Tom's Quotes

“Wait a minute! This is grass! We've been eating grass!”
― Gary Larson, The Complete Far Side, 1980–1994

“Is this something you can share with everyone, Amazing Larry?”
― Paul Reubens

“This matter is best disposed of from a great height, over water.”
― Ernest Lehman

“Mr. Dick, give me your hand, for your common sense is invaluable.”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“You're the ruler of the universe. Try to show a little taste!”
― Ed Wood

“I like my smock. You can tell the quality of the artist by the quality of his smock. Actually, I just like to say smock. Smock smock smock smock smock smock.”
― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“Alfonse invested everything he did with a sense of all-consuming purpose. He knew four languages, had photographic memory, did complex mathematics in his head. He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.”
― Don Dellilo

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I want the best of everything for everybody, and it will cost millions.”
― Joyce Carey

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.”
― Richard Hughes

“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.”
― Martin Luther

“Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,-- Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to Lawyers,-- nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,-- her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,-- that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,-- not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,-- rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

“It was all Mrs. Bumble. She would do it," urged Mr. Bumble; first looking round, to ascertain that his partner had left the room.

That is no excuse," returned Mr. Brownlow. "You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and, indeed, are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction."

If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass — a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience — by experience.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist