Draško Roganović > Draško's Quotes

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Did I ever tell you about the man
who taught his asshole to talk?

His whole abdomen would move up and down,
you dig, farting out the words.

It was unlike anything I ever heard.

Bubbly, thick, stagnant sound.

A sound you could smell.

This man worked for the carnival,you dig?

And to start with it was
like a novelty ventriloquist act.

After a while,
the ass started talking on its own.

He would go in
without anything prepared...

and his ass would ad-lib
and toss the gags back at him every time.

Then it developed sort of teethlike...

little raspy incurving hooks
and started eating.

He thought this was cute at first
and built an act around it...

but the asshole would eat its way through
his pants and start talking on the street...

shouting out it wanted equal rights.

It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags.
Nobody loved it.

And it wanted to be kissed,
same as any other mouth.

Finally, it talked all the time,
day and night.

You could hear him for blocks,
screaming at it to shut up...

beating at it with his fists...

and sticking candles up it, but...

nothing did any good,
and the asshole said to him...

"It is you who will shut up
in the end, not me...

"because we don't need you
around here anymore.

I can talk and eat and shit."

After that, he began waking up
in the morning with transparentjelly...

like a tadpole's tail
all over his mouth.

He would tear it off his mouth
and the pieces would stick to his hands...

like burning gasoline jelly
and grow there.

So, finally, his mouth sealed over...

and the whole head...

would have amputated spontaneously
except for the eyes, you dig?

That's the one thing
that the asshole couldn't do was see.

It needed the eyes.

Nerve connections were blocked...

and infiltrated and atrophied.

So, the brain couldn't
give orders anymore.

It was trapped inside the skull...

sealed off.

For a while, you could see...

the silent, helpless suffering
of the brain behind the eyes.

And then finally
the brain must have died...

because the eyes went out...

and there was no more feeling in them
than a crab's eye at the end of a stalk.”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.

They're right. It does.

However much you beg it to stop.

It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember.

It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life...

All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom.

Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor.

Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks.

And then the world turns...

And somebody falls off...

And oh God it's such a long way down.

Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller...

Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible.

We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth.

Trying to measure how far we have to fall.

No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives...

Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold.

"Time's a great healer."

"At least it was quick."

"The world keeps turning."

Oh Alec—

Alec's dead.”
― Alan Moore, Swamp Thing, Vol. 5: Earth to Earth

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

“Anybody who has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition ... must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect.”
― Flann O'Brien

“Before it was a Bomb, the Bomb was an Idea. Superman, however, was a Faster, Stronger, Better Idea.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Maybe I had a "secret identity", but then when you think about it, don't we all? A part of ourselves very few people ever get to see. The part we think of as "me". The part that deals with the big stuff. Makes the real choices. The part everything else is a reflection of.”
― Kurt Busiek, Superman: Secret Identity

“And is that why we do what we do? For public approval, for fame? Do we help people because they will be appropriately grateful--or merely because they need the help?”
― Kurt Busiek, Astro City: Metrobook, Vol. 1

“And I saw in them a hope...A hope that it was possible to have secrets, to mask one's true nature...and yet still to walk among men. ”
― Kurt Busiek, Astro City, Vol. 2: Confession

“He was saving innocents and serving truth. And in the final judgement, what is more important? The burdens we bear -- or the way we bear them?”
― Kurt Busiek, Astro City, Vol. 2: Confession

“It strikes me that the only real reason to take apart a pocket watch, or a car engine, aside from the simple delight of disassembly, is to find out how it works. To understand it, so you can put it back together again better than before, or build a new one that goes beyond what the old one could do. We’ve been taking apart the superhero for ten years or more; it's time to put it back together and wind it up, time to take it out on the road and floor it, see what it’ll do.”
― Kurt Busiek, Astro City, Vol. 1: Life in the Big City

“She said things that'd have sounded like cliches--but when they're said by the woman you love in the middle of the night, it's different.

I said things that sounded like cowboy-movie junk, even when they were coming out of my mouth. But I meant them.”
― Kurt Busiek, Astro City, Vol. 5: Local Heroes

“Superhero science has taught me this: Entire universes fit comfortably inside our skulls. Not just one or two but endless universes can be packed into that dark, wet, and bony hollow without breaking it open from the inside. The space in our heads will stretch to accommodate them all. The real doorway to the fifth dimension was always right here. Inside. That infinite interior space contains all the divine, the alien, and the unworldly we’ll ever need.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“We are the hands and eyes and ears, the sensitive probing feelers through which the emergent, intelligent universe comes to know its own form and purpose. We bring the thunderbolt of meaning and significance to unconscious matter, blank paper, the night sky. We are already divine magicians, already supergods. Why shouldn't we use all our brilliance to leap in as many single bounds as it takes to a world beyond ours, threatened by overpopulation, mass species extinction, environmental degradation, hunger, and exploitation? Superman and his pals would figure a way out of any stupid cul-de-sac we could find ourselves in - and we made Superman, after all. All it takes is that one magic word.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“I just wanted all the wars to be over so that we could spend the money on starships and Mars colonies.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“The interior of our skulls contains a portal to infinity.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“Seven actors have played Batman on the big screen, and if you can name all seven without reading any further, your youth has been wasted.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“If this book has made any point clear, I hope it's that things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“We've always known we'd eventually be called upon to open our shirts and save the day, and the superhero was a crude, hopeful attempt to talk about how we all might feel on that day of great power, and great responsibility.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“Actually, it's as if [Superman is] more real than we are. We writers come and go, generations of artists leave their interpretations, and yet something persists, something that is always Superman.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it’s only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean. Because the numinous is everywhere, we need to be reminded of it. We live among wonders. Superhuman cyborgs, we plug into cell phones connecting us to one another and to a constantly updated planetary database, an exo-memory that allows us to fit our complete cultural archive into a jacket pocket. We have camera eyes that speed up, slow down, and even reverse the flow of time, allowing us to see what no one prior to the twentieth century had ever seen — the thermodynamic miracle of broken shards and a puddle gathering themselves up from the floor to assemble a half-full wineglass. We are the hands and eyes and ears, the sensitive probing feelers through which the emergent, intelligent universe comes to know its own form and purpose. We bring the thunderbolt of meaning and significance to unconscious matter, blank paper, the night sky. We are already divine magicians, already supergods. Why shouldn’t we use all our brilliance to leap in as many single bounds as it takes to a world beyond ours, threatened by overpopulation, mass species extinction, environmental degradation, hunger, and exploitation? Superman and his pals would figure a way out of any stupid cul-de-sac we could find ourselves in — and we made Superman, after all.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“Doctor Doom was exactly the sort of bastard who would have armed al-Qaeda with death rays and killer robots if he thought for one second it would piss off the hated Reed Richards and the rest of his mortal enemies in the Fantastic Four, but here he was sobbing with the best of them, as representative not of evil, but of Marvel Comics' collective shock, struck dumb and moved to hand-drawn tears by the thought that anyone could hate America and its people enough to do this.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human