Will Northerner > Will's Quotes

“You can get all A's and still flunk life.”
― Walker Percy, The Second Coming

“Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, 'I ain't got any tattoo on my back.'

'What you got on it?' the girl said.

'My shirt,' Parker said. 'Haw.'

'Haw, haw,' the girl said politely.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories

“...we are singing today of the WIPE-OUT GANG - the WIPE-OUT GANG buys, owns & operates the Insanity Factory - if you do not know where the Insanity Factory is located, you should hereby take two steps to the right, paint your teeth & go to sleep....”
― Bob Dylan

“Winter solitude-
in a world of one colour
the sound of the wind.”
― Basho Matsuo

“By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure.'
A spinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives... and to the "good life", whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman

“I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Trifles make the sum of life. ”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“The reason for the unreason with which you treat my reason , so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty.”
― Cervantes Saavedra

“Even if you have not awakened, if you realize that your perceptions and activities are all like dreams and you view them with detachment, not giving rise to grasping and rejecting discrimination, then this is virtually tantamount to awakening from the dream.”
― Muso Kokushi

“What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.”
― Annie Proulx

“TYRONE

[Stares at him -- impressed.]
Yes, there's the makings of a poet in you all right.

[Then protesting uneasily]
But that's morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death.

EDMUND

[Sardonically]

The makings of a poet. No, I'm afraid I'm like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn't even got the makings. He's got only the habit. I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do, I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.”
― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

“I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty...But I am too busy thinking about myself.”
― Edith Sitwell

“Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.”
― Woody Allen

“Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence....”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Nature's God

“I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin

“What is the answer?"
[ I [Alice B Toklas] was silent ]
In that case, what is the question?”
― Gertrude Stein

“I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”
― Marcel Duchamp

“There is in every madman
a misunderstood genius
whose idea
shining in his head
frightened people
and for whom delirium was the only solution
to the strangulation
that life had prepared for him.”
― Antonin Artaud

“People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
― William Faulkner