Larry

“Neurotic people often feel as if they are fakes, playing the social game while inwardly despising it, and have a sense of illegitimacy as if they lacked a place in the world. This sense of having a double life creates conflict, yet in as-if cases, there is never a struggle between the "real me" and the social self, as one might expect. It is an identification without conflict. Sometimes, their stiffness and superficiality in social relations may be noticed by other people, and it can give the picture of the commitment-phobe. In fact, the person just knows at some level to stay away from situations that would involve an appeal to the symbolic, those, precisely, where a commitment is involved.”
― Darian Leader, What Is Madness?

“What all of what was then to be understood to be being presumed so makes something now recognizable as to what we were, in fact, then speaking of in speaking of ‘whales’.”
― Charles Travis

“E-mail memo #34: "Miami Book Fair; writer locked himself in bookstore bathroom repeatedly yelling at concerned employees to 'Go away!' When writer emerged an hour later he started to 'freak out' afain. 'I have a snake on me!' writer screamed. 'It's biting me! It's IN MY MOUTH!' Writer was dragged to a waiting squad car while holding on to a bewildered young yeshiva student attending the reading -- whom writer continuously fondled and groped -- until ambulance arrived. His eyes rolling back into his head, writer's last words -- shouted -- before being driven off were quote 'I am keeping the Jew-boy' unquote.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park

“I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one’s self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales. This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of this book. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy