Jay > Jay's Quotes

“The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House

“I ask for silence

though it's late, though it's night,
and you are not able.

Sing as if nothing were wrong.

Nothing is wrong.”
― Pizarnik Alejandra

“Linger now with me, thou Beauty,
On the sharp archaic shore.
Surely 'tis a wastrel's duty
And the gods could ask no more.
If thou lingerest when I linger,
If thou tread'st the stones I tread,
Thou wilt stay my spirit's hunger
And dispel the dreams I dread.

Come thou, love, my own, my only,
Through the battlements of Groan;
Lingering becomes so lonely
When one lingers on one's own.

I have lingered in the cloisters
Of the Northern Wing at night,
As the sky unclasped its oysters
On the midnight pearls of light;
For the long remorseless shadows
Chilled me with exquisite fear.
I have lingered in cold meadows
Through a month of rain, my dear.

Come, my Love, my sweet, my Only,
Through the parapets of Groan.
Lingering can be very lonely
When one lingers on one's own.

In dark alcoves I have lingered
Conscious of dead dynasties;
I have lingered in blue cellars
And in hollow trunks of trees.
Many a traveler through moonlight
Passing by a winding stair
Or a cold and crumbling archway
Has been shocked to see me there.

I have longed for thee, my Only,
Hark! the footsteps of the Groan!
Lingering is so very lonely
When one lingers all alone.

Will thou come with me, and linger?
And discourse with me of those
Secret things the mystic finger
Points to, but will not disclose?
When I'm all alone, my glory
Always fades, because I find
Being lonely drives the splendour
Of my vision from my mind.

Come, oh, come, my own! my Only!
Through the Gormenghast of Groan.
Lingering has become so lonely
As I linger all alone!”
― Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

“The world must be all fucked up, when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“A lot of screams for so little wool, said the man who sheared the pig”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In

“This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself behind my leaks.

“I know,” I said.

“You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said.

“I know,” I said.

There in the cocktail lounge, peering out through my leaks at a world of my own invention, I mouthed this word: schizophrenia. The sound and appearance of the word had fascinated me for many years. It sounded and looked to me like a human being sneezing in a blizzard of soapflakes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“Irma, a stalagmite of crimson stone, knew, for all the riot of her veins that a page had turned over. At chapter forty? O no! At chapter one, for she had never lived before save in a pulseless preface.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?”
― Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

“Remember the light and believe the light

An instant of clarity before eternal night

don't let me forget”
― Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis

“And because we're being honest, because we're girl besties, I guess the truth is really this. You took something I love from me, but... I really might have just done all this anyway.”
― CJ leede, Maeve

“We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I am being so silly because I pity you so much. I pity all of us so much.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Thallus, you faggot, softer than rabbitfur,
or goosedown, or a sweet little earlobe,
or an old man's listless dick, lying in cobwebs and neglect.
And yet, when the full moon shows the other guests starting to nod and yawn,
you're grabbier than a plunging hurricane.
Give me back my housecoat, which you pounced on,
and my good Spanish flax table napkins, and the painted boxwood writing tablets,
which you keep on display, jerk, like they were heirlooms,
unstick them from your claws and give them back
or I'll use a whip to scribble some really embarrassing lines,
hot as the iron that brands disgrace on a common thief,
on your woolsoft sides and dainty little hands.
You'll get excited in a brand new way, your head will spin
like a boat caught out on the open sea when the winds go mad.”
― Gaius Valerius Catull, The Complete Poems

“When I die                             do not throw                             the meat and bones away                             but pile them up                             and let them tell                             by their smell                             what life was worth                             on this earth                             what love was worth                             in the end.”
― Hemanta Bora, A Treatise on KAMALA DAS'S POETIC-EROTICISM : A LIFE-LINE BEYOND

“Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even. ... She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“...the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open..”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.”
― Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

“Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Platform

“If it wasn’t one thing it was another, and it never mattered which. Always something to run away from, no matter what, no matter why, as though you’d been born with a consciousness of guilt and would find that thing to feel guilty about regardless.”
― Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend

“Like all his attempts at fiction it would be as personal as a letter—painful to those who knew him, of no interest to those who didn’t; precious or self-pitying in spots, in others too clever for its own good; so packed with Shakespeare that it looked as if he worked with a concordance in his lap; so narcissistic that its final effect would be that of the mirrored room which gives back the same image times without count, or the old Post Toastie box of his boyhood with the fascinating picture of a woman and child holding a Post Toastie box with a picture of a woman and child holding a Post Toastie box with a picture of a woman and child holding—-”
― Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend

“What I saw was a large gilt upright bathtub with Seneca lying upright in it just after he had slashed the veins in his wrist, thereby proving to himself how right he was to have written that little book I so loved, On Tranquillity of Mind”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“I'm beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.”
― Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“When the drink was set before him, he felt better. He did not drink it immediately. Now that he had it, he did not need to.”
― Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend

“The answer was nowhere, the drink was everything. What a blessing the money in his pocket, he must get more, much more for the feast of drink ahead.”
― Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend

“THE barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.”
― Charles R. Jackson, The Lost Weekend

“As soon as you begin to think, you can no longer love life”
― Ágota Kristóf, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels