Nathan > Nathan's Quotes

“Eight solid light-years of lead...is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos. I guess the little fuckers are everywhere.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it is on your plate.”
― Thornton Wilder

“As for the human case, the generation of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire—so significant to those involved—are not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope.”
― Gore Vidal, The Golden Age

“The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“It's no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think — to say it in your own words, without compromise.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“The high ambition, therefore, seems to me to be this: That one should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with the maximum of skepticism, the maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality with the maximum of ironic self-criticism. This would mean really deciding to learn from history rather than invoking or sloganising it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“It is supposed to be an axiom of "Western" civilization that the individual, or the truth, may not be sacrificed to hypothetical benefits such as "order.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“If you care about the points of agreement and civility, then, you had better be well-equipped with points of argument and combativity, because if you are not then the "center" will be occupied and defined without your having helped to decide it, or determine what and where it is.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“New forms of the artistic register are one of the infallible signs of an authentic moment.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“As I now see it, America had no business involving itself in a series of distant convulsions where the ideas, variously interpreted, of a long-dead German economist were bringing biblical calamity to China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“One recalls John Updike's argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“There are several accounts, written or deposed, by the guards, executioners and inhumers of the Romanovs. One of the inhumers said that he could 'die in peace because he had squeezed the Empress's -----.'*

*Pipes's note reads: 'Deposition by P. V. Kukhtenko in Solokov Dossier I, dated September 8, 1918; omission in the original.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Ideology brings about a disastrous fusion: that of violence and righteousness — a savagery without stain.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Robert Conquest once suggested that 'a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Nearly every night there were screenings in the private projection rooms in the Kremlin or the various dachas. Khrushchev says that Stalin was particularly keen on Westerns: 'He used to curse them and give them proper ideological evaluation, but then immediately order new ones.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Stalin's mental journey, by 1943, proceeded in the opposite direction to that of Hitler. One moved toward reality; the other moved away from it. They crossed paths at Stalingrad. And as the war turned on the hinge of that battle (and on the new psychological opposition), Stalin might have concerned himself with a "counterfactual": if, instead of decapitating his army, he had intelligently prepared it for war, Russia might have defeated Germany in a matter of weeks. Such a course of action, while no doubt entailing grave consequences of its own, would have saved about 40 million lives, including the vast majority of the victims of the Holocaust.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“The militant Utopian, the perfectibilizer, from the outset, is in a malevolent rage at the obvious fact of human imperfectibility.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“The objectivity we sought was the power to recollect — if not in tranquillity, at least in 'dispassion' and this power is rarely granted except to the imaginative writer.”
― Richard Crossman, The God that Failed

“The Communist novice, subjecting his soul to the canon law of the Kremlin, felt something of the release which Catholicism also brings to the intellectual, wearied and worried by the privilege of freedom.”
― Richard Crossman, The God that Failed

“With relentless selectivity, the Communist machine has winnowed out the grain and retained only the chaff of Western culture.”
― Richard Crossman, The God that Failed

“But no one who has not wrestled with Communism as a philosophy, and Communists as political opponents, can really understand the values of Western democracy. The Devil once lived in Heaven, and those who have not met him are unlikely to recognize an angel when they see one.”
― Richard Crossman, The God that Failed

“Persuasion may play a part in a man's conversion; but only the part of bringing to its full and conscious climax a process which has been maturing in regions where no persuasion can penetrate. A faith is not acquired; it grows like a tree.”
― Arthur Koestler, The God that Failed

“Among other members of our cell I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich, Founder and Director of the Sex-Pol. (Institute for Sexual Politics). He was a Freudian Marxist; inspired by Malinowski, he had just published a book called 'The Function of the Orgasm,' in which he expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the Proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cock-eyed than it sounds.”
― Arthur Koestler, The God that Failed

“Generally speaking, words like 'agent of,' 'Democracy,' 'Freedom,' etc. meant something quite different in Party usage from what they meant in general usage; and as, furthermore, even their Party meaning changed with each shift of the line, our polemical methods became rather like the croquet game of the Queen of Hearts, in which the hoops moved about the field and the balls were live hedgehogs. With this difference, that when a player missed his turn and the Queen shouted 'Off with his head,' the order was executed in earnest. To survive, we all had to become virtuosos of Wonderland croquet.”
― Arthur Koestler, The God that Failed

“The addiction to the Soviet myth is as tenacious and difficult to cure as any other addiction.”
― Arthur Koestler, The God that Failed

“But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether. You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting. There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary. There are no circumstances in the world that determined action cannot alter, unless perhaps they are the walls of a prison cell, and even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into the infirmary compartment at any rate, for the man who can fast with resolution.”
― H.G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly

“HECTOR
Well, I don't mean to be drowned like a rat in a trap. I still have the will to live. What am I to do?

CAPT. SHOTOVER
Do? Nothing simpler. Learn your business as an Englishman.

HECTOR
And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?

CAPT. SHOTOVER
Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be damned.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House

“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Randy begins to orgasm.

RANDY
Yeah! Ha ha! Ah ha. Ahh. Ha. Ah. Ha ha. Ha. Oh baby. Oh fuck. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ah. Oh baby. Huh-ahhh. Ah. Oh God. Oh God. Mmm. Yeah. Squeeze.

Gurgling sound of cum being squeezed out of Jenna.

RANDY
Oh ho ho. Oh yeah. Oh fuck. Yeah. Oh look at you. Look at you. Look at that. Oh baby. You are so fucking fine.

Jenna giggles.”
― Jenna Jameson, How to... Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale