"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which" Last line from "Animal Farm" by George Orwell

"It was as though they were surprised that the bomb should have been made in the factory, carried into the sky and dropped to earth with only one aim - that of killing the fathers of the little Getmanovs and Nyeudobnovs. It was as though they were thinking: 'So that's what people get up to during a war.'" page 490 of "Life And Fate" by Vasily Grossman

The future you have tomorrow won't be the future you had yesterday

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open

When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person



All Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

"You are the beautiful day, I exclaim. Your breath is a zephyr of eucalyptus that does a pas de bourre across the Sea of Galilee."

Mark Leyner - I Was an Infinitely Hot and Dense White Dot

In the commonplace i find unexpected themes and intensities.

-White Noise, Don Delillo.



Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow.

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."

-Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, also among favorite opening lines. Jeremy Irons' delivery of the lines in Adrian Lyne's film version captures the poetry perfectly.

"The words novelties and souvenirs simply entranced her with their trochaic lilt."

-Also from Lolita

I have a list of quotes somewhere, but I just moved, and there's no way in hell I'm finding it in less than two months. Here's my favorite, off the top of my head:

"The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolled and rolled and called to me. Come in, it said, come in."

~The Wanderer by Sharon Creech

"Control the things you can control. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you. And if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing."
- The Dark Tower series, Stephen King

"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."
- Conan series, Robert E. Howard


And my all-time favorite:

"And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might;
Since it was better to glimpse the sky and perish,
Than to live without ever beholding the day."
- The Outsider, H.P. Lovecraft

The oldest of mankind's emotions is fear, and the most powerful of those is fear of the unknown. We live on a placid isle in the black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we venture far.

HP Lovecraft.

I'm reading a memoir for a class I have on the Holocaust. The book is written by a survivor of Auschwitz. I came across this line, which I thought was poignant and sobering, made more so by the fact that this is a true story, and isn't fictional. It was written while they're on the train, on the way to what they are sure will be their doom.

"There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect. Few know how to remain silent, and respect the silence of others."

~Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

"To refute a solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he's a liar."

-Desert Solitaire

"One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name." Ayn Rand The Fountainhead

Ellsworth Toohey: "Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me in any words you wish."
Howard Roark: "But I don't think of you"
The Fountainhead

"And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

"That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even death may die."
H.P. Lovecraft Quoting the Necronomicon, in "The Nameless City"

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
H.P. Lovecraft "The Call of Cthulhu"

Oh and this one. Though I don't know what book it's from.

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.
Charles Baudelaire

Posted by Oryx "That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even death may die." H.P. Lovecraft Quoting the Necronomicon, in "The Nameless City" "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." H.P. Lovecraft "The Call of Cthulhu"

HPL FTW!