Kerry Gehlhausen > Kerry's Quotes

“He was a planet without an atmosphere.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“И аз чувствам, че има нещо много сериозно, много важно, което трябва да ти кажа, мой несъществуващи читателю, и чувствам, че трябва да го кажа така настоятелно, както ако стоях в стаята пред теб. Че животът – какъвто и други качества да има – е кратък. Че съдбата е жестока, но може би не е произволна. Че Природата (с което искам да кажа Смъртта) винаги побеждава, но това не означава, че трябва да се преклоним, да коленичим пред нея. Че дори ако невинаги сме щастливи, че сме тук, нашата задача е да се потопим в живота така или иначе; да газим право напред, напряко през тази помийна яма, с отворени очи и открити сърца. И когато умираме, когато се издигаме над материалното и когато потъваме отново, позорно, в материалното, за нас е гордост и привилегия да обичаме онова, което смъртта не може да докосне. Защото, макар че забвението и злополучията са преследвали тази картина през вековете – по същия начин я е преследвала и любовта. И доколкото тя е безсмъртна (а тя е безсмъртна), аз имам един мъничък, светъл, непроменим дял в това безсмъртие. И аз добавям своята любов към историята на хората, които са обичали красивите неща, които са ги търсили, които са ги спасявали от огъня, издирвали са ги, когато са изчезнели, опитвали са се да ги съхранят и да ги спасят, предавайки ги буквално от ръка на ръка и, сияйната им песен се издига над разрухата на времето и достига до нови и нови поколения любители на красотата.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“I tiger can smile
A snake will say it loves you
Lies make us evil”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead.
You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“The best writers tend to look the roughest in photos. At least that's the excuse I use for why I look so bad in mine.”
― R.D. Ronald

“The guard looked down at the scarlet bloodstains blooming on his chest. He appeared to think of something that he needed to say, but as his lips began to form the words, his knees gave up the strain of supporting his ruined bulk. He collapsed to the floor, his throat issuing a final sound like a bubbling casserole.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“If your world is out there and you are in here then the only things that will gather within these walls are time and bitterness. Eventually, that bitterness will eat away at you and leave nothing behind but resentment and hate.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.”
― Albert Camus

“I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“Of course, true love is exceptional - two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“If you can’t make a girl come why even bother? That always seemed to me to be like writing questions in a letter.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction

“suddenly I’m seized by a minor anxiety attack. There are too many fucking movies to choose from.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“You don't know what torture is. You don't know what you're talking about. You really don't know what you're talking about.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Readers will recall that the little evidence collected seemed to point to the strange and confusing figure of an unidentified Air Force pilot whose body was washed ashore on a beach near Dieppe three months later. Other traces of his ‘mortal remains’ were found in a number of unexpected places: in a footnote to a paper on some unusual aspects of schizophrenia published thirty years earlier in a since defunct psychiatric journal; in the pilot for an unpurchased TV thriller, ‘Lieutenant 70’; and on the record labels of a pop singer known as The Him — to instance only a few. Whether in fact this man was a returning astronaut suffering from amnesia, the figment of an ill-organized advertising campaign, or, as some have suggested, the second coming of Christ, is anyone’s guess.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“The Chinese enjoyed the grim spectacle of death, Jim had decided, as a way of reminding themselves of how precariously they were alive. They liked to be cruel for the same reason, to remind themselves of the vanity of thinking that the world was anything else.”
― J. G. Ballard

“We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“We are still strangers as we sleep,
You and I,
And all our intimacies
Those hours ago
Make it only more so.'

It is an old cry, I suppose
Knowing
We have shared bodies
Wondering
Have we shared minds,
And right now I feel more close
To those of my own sex
Who too have lain and wondered so
Than I do,
Lady,
To you.
And I feel I am no longer me
But a man, with
A girl
(Dichotomy; should I call me a boy
Or you a woman?)
And wonder, perhaps uneasily,
Had you woken first,
What later thoughts
My sleep
Might have raised in you.
You sleep, oblivious.
– Probably the wiser course.

Another age might have caused some pious
Guilt in one of us at least,
Yet prisoners of one time though we may be
I feel this closer, now, to all other ages,
And all this sexuality.
Our nearly love,
Only
A time machine

... Yet it remains, remains yet,
And still I wonder
Do we share thoughts?
Have we shared thoughts?
And if we do,
And if we have,
Was the only one,
This?”
― Iain Banks, Poems

“Hersesy is denying the word of God, and the word of God is much more reliably expressed in the natural world as it’s revealed through reason and science than in what I have heard described wonderfully as “the giant book of Jewish fairy stories”
― Iain M Banks

“Why couldn't Rachel be a little more specific about the type of person she was? Goodness knew; if she were a hippie I'd talk to her about her drug experiences, the zodiac, tarot cards. If she were left-wing I'd look miserable, hate Greece, and eat baked beans straight from the tin. If she were the sporty type I'd play her at... chess and backgammon and things.”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

“I used to think there was no time like the present. I used to think there was no time but the present. Now I know better—or different, anyway. In the end, the past will always be there. The past is all there is: the present never sticks around for long enough, and the future is anybody’s guess. In time, you always have to hand it to the past. It always gets you in the end.”
― Martin Amis, Other People

“He could take one look at me- at the ashtray, the bottle, the four pots of coffee, my face, and my gut set like a stone on the white band of the towel- he could take one look at me and be pretty sure i ran on heavy fuel.”
― Martin Amis, Money

“Being someone's responsibility makes them hate you.”
― Richard Bachman, Rage

“Two years ago. To the best of my recollection, that was about the time I started to lose my mind.”
― Richard Bachman

“Sie würden ihm helfen, ihn heilen. Arzneien und Ärzte. Eine Änderung der Einstellung.
Dann Frieden.
Seine Streitsüchtigkeit würde wie Unkraut aus ihm herausgejätet werden.”
― Richard Bachman, The Running Man

“When everything is at its worst, your mind just throws it all into the wastebasket and goes to Florida for a little while. There is a sudden electric what-the-hell glow as you stand there looking back over your shoulder at the bridge you just burnt down.”
― Richard Bachman

“Ain’t none of you ever been stuck in the mud and needed a push? I won’t ask you how you can be for this and still call yourselves Christians, because one of you would have some kind of answer out of what I call the Holy-Joe-Do-It-My-Way Bible. But, Jeezly-Crow! How can you read the parable of the Good Samaritan on Sunday and then say you’re for a thing like this on Monday night?”
― Richard Bachman, Blaze