Benjamin > Benjamin's Quotes

“To say nothing of what you lose, lose, lose, are losing, man. You fool, you stupid fool ... You've even been insulated from the responsibility of genuine suffering ... Even the suffering you do endure is largely unnecessary. Actually spurious. It lacks the very basis you require of it for its tragic nature. You deceive yourself.”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“The Consul felt a pang. Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, to someone you loved perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and peace in the world; was that not like the opportunity afforded man by life itself? Of course not. Still, just for a moment, it had seemed that it was.”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
― Roberto Bolano

“This is not an exit.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Disintegration---I'm taking it in stride.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Indeed, on the face of it, this man of abnormal strength and constitution and obscure ambition, whom Hugh would never know, could never deliver nor make agreement to God for, but in his way loved and desired to help, had triumphantly succeeded in pulling himself together.”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“Haven’t you got any tenderness or love left for me at all?” Yvonne asked suddenly, almost piteously, turning round on him, and he thought: Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or a weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either approaching or receding, I can’t tell which. “Don’t you think of anything except of how many drinks you’re going to have?”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“—And yet, he was thinking all over again, and all over again as for the first time, how he had suffered, suffered, suffered without her; indeed such desolation, such a desperate sense of abandonment bereavement, as during this last year without Yvonne, he had never known in his life, unless it was when his mother died. But this present emotion he had never experienced with his mother: this urgent desire to hurt, to provoke, at a time when forgiveness alone could save the day, this, rather, had commenced with his stepmother, so that she would have to cry:—“I can’t eat, Geoffrey, the food sticks in my throat!” It was hard to forgive, hard, hard to forgive. Harder still, not to say how hard it was, I hate you. Even now, of all times. Even though here was God’s moment, the chance to agree, to produce the card, to change everything; or there was but a moment left … Too late. The Consul had controlled his tongue. But he felt his mind divide and rise, like the two halves of a counterpoised drawbridge, ticking, to permit”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“Far too soon it had begun to seem too much of a triumph, it had been too good, too horribly unimaginable to lose, impossible finally to bear: it was as if it had become itself its own foreboding that it could not last, a foreboding that was like a presence too, turning his steps towards the taverns again. And how could one begin all over again, as though the Café Chagrin, the Farolito, had never been?”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“The slow darkening of the murals as you look from right to left. It seems somehow to symbolise the gradual imposition of the Spaniards’ conquering will upon the Indians. Do you see what I mean?”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“…“Please let me make her happy, deliver me from this dreadful tyranny of self. I have sunk low. Let me sink lower still, that I may know the truth. Teach me to love again, to love life.” That wouldn’t do either … “Where is love? Let me truly suffer. Give me back my purity, the knowledge of the Mysteries, that I have betrayed and lost.—Let me be truly lonely, that I may honestly pray. Let us be happy again somewhere, if it’s only together, if it’s only out of this terrible world. Destroy the world!” he cried in his heart.”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“The heart is in darkness, unknowing, like those animals in mines that have never seen the day. It has no loyalties, no hopes; it has its task.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“THEY WERE DIVORCED IN THE fall. I wish it could have been otherwise. The clarity of those autumn days affected them both. For Nedra, it was as if her eyes had been finally opened; she saw everything, she was filled with a great, unhurried strength. It was still warm enough to sit outdoors. Viri walked, the old dog wandering behind him. The fading grass, the trees, the very light made him dizzy, as if he were an invalid or starving. He caught the aroma of his own life passing. All during the proceedings, they lived as they always had, as if nothing were going on. The judge who gave her the final decree pronounced her name wrong. He was tall and decaying, the pores visible in his cheeks. He misread a number of things; no one corrected him. It was November. Their last night together they sat listening to music—it was Mendelssohn—like a dying composer and his wife. The room was peaceful, filled with beautiful sound. The last logs burned. “Would you like some ouzo?” she asked. “I don’t think there is any.” “We drank it all?” “Some time ago.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“Every object, even those which had been hers, which he never touched, seemed to share his loss. He was suddenly parted from his life. That presence, loving or not, which fills the emptiness of rooms, mildens them, makes them light—that presence was gone. The simple greed that makes one cling to a woman left him suddenly desperate, stunned. A fatal space had opened, like that between a liner and the dock which is suddenly too wide to leap; everything is still present, visible, but it cannot be regained.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“DEAD FLIES ON THE SILLS OF sunny windows, weeds along the pathway, the kitchen empty. The house was melancholy, deceiving; it was like a cathedral where, amid the serenity, something is false, the saints are made of florist’s wax, the organ has been gutted.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“He lived in it helplessly as we live in our bodies when we are older.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was not a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“He had his life—it was not worth much—not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one—we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“He walks toward the river, placing his feet carefully. His suit is too warm and tight. He reaches the water’s edge. There is the dock, unused now, with its flaking paint and rotten boards, its underpilings drenched in green. Here at the great, dark river, here on the bank. It happens in an instant. It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore. Yes, he thought, I am ready, I have always been ready, I am ready at last.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“Blanchette stared toward the room in which Rankin’s future had been diverted. Yes, he could’ve made it, all right, Blanchette thought. Not with his next breath or two, but by the time he was fifty, fifty-five. It was up to someone else now. The end of his cigar had a thumb of ash on it, so Blanchette flicked it on the rug, then rubbed it in with his foot. He looked”
― Daniel Woodrell, The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do

“Shade said as he stepped down the hall, “is another of the ‘eternal boy’s’ major concerns, if you can believe it.” The officer sat down and swung his feet to the desktop. “I probably could,” he said, “but I think I’ll pass.” Blanchette leaned on Shade’s arm, a pantomime of crumbling health, and swatted at his”
― Daniel Woodrell, The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do

“stained raincoats, I reckon.” “And shitpaper stuck to their shoes.”
― Daniel Woodrell, The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do

“On his next return to this world, Duncan Cobb, oldest son, faithless cousin, cautious lover, and pal of killers, awoke infused with the lucidity born of no escape, and a mortal dose of honesty.”
― Daniel Woodrell, The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do

“In reminiscing about the area between Augusta and Wilkes County in Georgia one writer remarked: The grand groves of oak and hickory had not been felled save in occasional spots. The annual fires of the Indian had kept down all undergrowth, and the demands of the stock-raiser had still called for those annual burnings; so that grass and flowers and flowering shrubs covered the surface of the earth with a vesture equal to that of a regal park.”
― Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840-1860

“After observing southern culture for some time, Emily Burke concluded that the people of the South would not think they could subsist without their [swine] flesh; bacon, instead of bread, seems to be THEIR staff of life. Consequently, you see bacon upon a Southern table three times a day either boiled or fried.16”
― Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840-1860

“An ex-slave commented on their gastronomical worth: “but verily there is nothing in all butcherdom so delicious as a roasted ’possum.”
― Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840-1860

“He was a man with a tin-ear present who dreamed of a rock-opera future.”
― Daniel Woodrell, The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do