Pulp Fiction Quotes

“Ezekiel 25:17. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you." I been sayin' that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, it meant your ass. I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before you popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this mornin' made me think twice. Now I'm thinkin': it could mean you're the evil man. And I'm the righteous man. And Mr. .45 here, he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could be you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. I'd like that. But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin, Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd.

he became the shepherd instead of the vengeance.

Jules Winnfield- Samuel L. Jackson”
― Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction: A Quentin Tarantino Screenplay

“There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: King James Version

“When the gap between the world of the city and the world my grandfather had presented to me as right and good became too wide and depressing to tolerate, I'd turn to my other great love, which was pulp adventure fiction. Despite the fact that [he] would have had nothing but scorn and loathing for all of those violent and garish magazines, there was a sort of prevailing morality in them that I'm sure he would have responded to. The world of Doc Savage and The Shadow was one of absolute values, where what was good was never in the slightest doubt and where what was evil inevitably suffered some fitting punishment. The notion of good and justice espoused by Lamont Cranston with his slouch hat and blazing automatics seemed a long way from that of the fierce and taciturn old man I remembered sitting up alone into the Montana night with no company save his bible, but I can't help feeling that if the two had ever met they'd have found something to talk about. For my part, all those brilliant and resourceful sleuths and heroes offered a glimpse of a perfect world where morality worked the way it was meant to. Nobody in Doc Savage's world ever killed themselves except thwarted kamikaze assassins or enemy spies with cyanide capsules. Which world would you rather live in, if you had the choice?”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“In Hamilton's The Universe Wreckers... it was in that novel that, for the first time, I learned Neptune had a satellite named Triton... It was from The Drums of Tapajos that I first learned there was a Mato Grosso area in the Amazon basin. It was from The Black Star Passes and other stories by John W. Campbell that I first heard of relativity.

The pleasure of reading about such things in the dramatic and fascinating form of science fiction gave me a push toward science that was irresistible. It was science fiction that made me want to be a scientist strongly enough to eventually make me one.

That is not to say that science fiction stories can be completely trusted as a source of specific knowledge... However, the misguidings of science fiction can be unlearned. Sometimes the unlearning process is not easy, but it is a low price to pay for the gift of fascination over science.”
― Isaac Asimov, Before the Golden Age: A Science Fiction Anthology of the 1930s

“What is pulp novel to literature, religion is to philosophy.”
― Abhaidev, The Gods Are Not Dead

“People tell me I live in the past. We all live in the past, I tell them, we just don't know it yet." ("Love Stories Are Too Violent For Me," Wild Card Press, 1995)”
― Will Viharo

“If people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines that I could write stories just as rotten.”
― Edgar Rice Burroughs

“Now I pass up about twenty-five or thirty thousand of honest gain because I like being a detective, like the work. And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can. Otherwise there’d be no sense to it. That’s the fix I am in. I don’t know anything else, don’t enjoy anything else, don’t want to know or enjoy anything else. You can’t weight that against any sum of money. Money’s good stuff. I haven’t anything against it.”
― Dashiell Hammett, The Big Knockover: Selected Stories and Short Novels

“Big beasties, swordplay, aliens, guns, ghosts, vampires, eldritch things from beyond and slime. A lot of slime.”
― William Meikle

“Memories of last night manifested slowly from the back of her brain, every new detail hammering her heart like a war drum: the flowers, the vodka, the persistent dream-like sensation, the closet, the outline of a stranger, the sex... and, most gut-wrenching of all, the sudden realization that he might still be here.”
― Jake Vander-Ark, Fallout Dreams

“Here's a thought. You answer what I ask and I keep not killing you." - Antiope Flint - DREAMNASIUM”
― Geoffrey Thorne

“By living, thinking, even dreaming the story in one continuous process, ideas came faster and faster. Sometimes the typewriter keys would fly so fast that I wondered if my fingers could keep up with them. And at the finish of the story I often had to take a few days off as my fingertips were too sore to begin work on the next book.”
― Walter B Gibson

“Foreboding” might have been the appropriate word. “Dread.” The PROMISE of fear. It was tangible fear... smellable... the stale odor soaking into the dirt and lingering in the windless jungle of dead branches and train tracks to nowhere; lovelier than angst, kinder than panic.”
― Jake Vander-Ark, Fallout Dreams

“The boy was there too, stumbling through the living room horde and passing out magic mushrooms from a paper bag. His eyeballs sparkled inside gaping, play-dough sockets while his limbs hung gaunt and exhausted from eight straight days of self-medicating fear. Another boy in a black tee pinched some mushroom flakes from his bag, nodded his thanks, and mouthed the word “bro” like blowing a man kiss.”
― Jake Vander-Ark, Fallout Dreams

“She was stubborn.
She was evolving.
She needed SOLITUDE like normal people needed exercise.”
― Jake Vander-Ark, Fallout Dreams

“The scar rippled from the top of her bikini line down to her thigh. Where normal girls had hair, Ava had a quilt of mangled skin that required tweezers to de-fur. For ten months she tried joking about it (“Turns out sharks really CAN smell menstrual blood a mile away!”). She tried fixing it with a myriad of steroid injections and silicon gels. She even tried ignoring it. Her last hope was to confront it.”
― Jake Vander-Ark, Fallout Dreams

“New sounds rustled through her anti-depressant haze; a gentle reverberation from the heart of the home... another creek... another thunk... rapid clicking like the wings of a broken cricket. Then, raindrops on metal... the escalating blare of a car horn... the scream of wet tires and the clink clink clink of showering glass.”
― Jake Vander-Ark, Fallout Dreams

“The search party became zombie silhouettes in shafts of early-morning light, yawning, despondent, and halfway home when a boy’s scream pierced the fog—“OVER HERE!”—and everybody ran.”
― Jake Vander-Ark, Fallout Dreams

“She wondered if she was the only person
trying not to imagine what death-by-bear looked like. Would bears pick the bones white? Or would they leave bits of meat for the coyotes to scavenge? The authorities hadn’t actually determined
the type of animal that did the mauling,
but she couldn’t help but picture a bear.”
― Jake Vander-Ark, Fallout Dreams

“She grappled his shoulder and pulled him closer; her nose in his neck and the memory-scent of her very first time; that sickly-sweet stench of day-old sweat and mall cologne... she wondered if he’d showered in the ten months since they last shared a bed.”
― Jake Vander-Ark, Fallout Dreams

“The whirlwind in his brain—which had so many times tugged his pituitary in ways that made him TAKE instead of GIVE—
subsided for the very first time.
Tightness in his crotch usually corresponded with a tightness in his gut, making him want to CONTROL, to CHOKE, to SUBDUE... but not this time.
Not ever again.”
― Jake Vander-Ark, Fallout Dreams

“She wondered if she was the only person trying not to imagine what death-by-bear looked like. Would bears pick the bones white? Or would they leave bits of meat for the coyotes to scavenge? The authorities hadn’t actually determined the type of animal that did the mauling, but she couldn’t help but picture a bear.” ”
― Jake Vander-Ark, Fallout Dreams

“Pulp is the vector for Eco, the cloak of Chandler, the soft pillow of Virginia Woolf, the birth caul of Cold Comfort Farm, the fairy godmother of Doris Lessing and William Gibson. Pulp is the key to open the doors not only of Freud and Jung, but even of Barthes, who stole everything from Calvino anyway but let us not go down that road for fear we shalln't return this night. Yes, Inspector, clap me in irons. I am a nerd.”
― Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

“Family, for good or for ill, is who you love with, who you fight with…who you try not to die with.”
― Mitch Hyman, Vinnie & Mook - Family and Fiends: A Hit Men of the Supernatural Anthology

“What is a hit man to do when the things you kill won't stay dead?”
― Mitch Hyman, Vinnie & Mook - Family and Fiends: A Hit Men of the Supernatural Anthology

“Mein Licht ist hell und strahlend. Meine Schatten lang und dunkel.”
― Terence Horn

“Pulp Fiction was a major success, commercially and critically,” according to Scott Cooper Florida, “It was Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece. Winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1994, the movie was also nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and even won Best Original Screenplay.”
― Scott Cooper Florida

“How many diners should a man rob before he turns the gun on himself? The question whispered in Richie’s ear as he swallowed the last bite of pancake. He and Alabama had gotten the idea of stealing from diners when they caught Pulp Fiction at a four-year anniversary screening in the New Beverly Cinema in LA last year where they’d gone to shoot dope and drift among the neon haze of Hollywood glitz, thinking Shit, look how in love they are holding up that diner, that could be us. But a dozen diners later the charm had worn off and they’d returned to being just a couple junkie losers stuck in the small-time.”
― Philip Elliott, Porno Valley

“It was a Thompson submachine gun. She calmly lowered the seat back in place.

She stuck the stock under her left armpit and clutched the front handle.

“Jesus!” I yelled. “Did you always have that there?”

“Yes!”

“What the hell were you waiting for?”

“I was waiting until we got into a jam,” she turned and hefted the Tommy gun rearward. “Cover your ears!”
― Bob Madison, The Lucifer Stone