Jean-Jacques Rouseau
“Quand le soir approchait, je descendais des cimes de l’île, et j’allais volontiers m’asseoir au bord du lac, sur la grève, dans quelque asile cache; là, le bruit des vagues et l’agitation de l’eau, fixant mes sens et chassant de mon âme toute autre agitation, la plongeaient dans une rêverie délicieuse, ou la nuit me surprenait souvent sans que je m’en fusse aperçu. Le flux et reflux de cette eau, son bruit continu, mais renflé par intervalles, frappant sans relâche mon oreille et mes yeux, suppléaient aux mouvements internes que la rêverie éteignait en moi, et suffisaient pour me faire sentir avec plaisir mon existence, sans prendre la peine de penser.”
François-Marie Arouet – Voltaire
“Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.”
“God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. “
“I hate women because they always know where things are.”
“Language is hard to put into words.”
“In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.”
“What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.”
“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”
Tom Robbins
“There is no such thing as a weird human being, It’s just that some people require more understanding than others”
“There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.”
“Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it”
Jack Kerouac
“I took up a conversation with a gorgeous country girl wearing a low cut cotton blouse that displayed the beautiful sun-tan on her breast tops. She was dull. She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do. ‘And what else do you do for fun?’ I tried to bring up boy friends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done-whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was. ‘What do you want out of life?’ I wanted to take her and wring it out of her. She didn’t have the slightest idea what she wanted. She mumbled of jobs, movies, going to her grandmother’s for the summer, wishing she could go to New York and visit the Roxy, what kind of outfit she would wear-something like the one she wore last Easter, white bonnet, roses, rose pumps, and lavender gabardine coat. ‘What do you do on Sunday afternoon?’ I asked. She sat on her porch. The boys went by on bicycles and stopped to chat. She read the funny papers, she reclined on the hammock. ‘What do you do on a warm summer’s night?’ She sat on the porch, she watched the cars in the road. She and her mother made popcorn. ‘What does your father do on a summer’s night?’ He works, he has an all-night shift at the boiler factory, he’s spent his whole life supporting a woman and her outpoppings and no credit or adoration. ‘What does your brother do on a summer’s night?’ He rides around on his bicycle, he hangs out in front of the soda fountain. ‘What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?’ She didn’t know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.”
“Anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven.”
-On The Road after an explanation of a time at a bar when he drank so much that he wandered into the bathroom and clung around the toilet bowl all night and was pissed on by 50 men
“…the other women were with me, we’d look out the window and the things they said, they made me see the preciousness of really being out of those damn bathrobes and out of there and out on the street, the sun, we could see ships, out and FREE man to roam around, how great it really is and how we never appreciate it all glum inside our worries and skins, like fools really, or blind spoiled detestable children pouting because . . . they can’t get . . . all . . . the . . . candy . . . they want. . .”
-The Subterraneans
“And it’s finally only in the woods you get that nostalgia for ‘cities’ at last, you dream of long gray journies to cities where soft evenings’ll unfold like Paris but primordial innocence of health and stillness in the wilds-So I tell myself ‘Be Wise’.”
“Yes that’s right, the population explosion is gonna cover every bit of backyard dirt in America someday in fact they’ll even have to start piling up friggin levels of houses and others over that like your cityCityCITY till the houses reach a hundred miles in the air in all directions of the map and people looking at the earth from another planet with super telescopes will see a prickly ball hangin in space-…-Hundreds of millions of hungry mouths raving for more more more-And the sadness of it all is that the world hasnt any chance to produce say a writer whose life could really actually touch all this life in every detail like you always say, some writer who could bring you sobbing thru the bed fuckin bedcribs of the moon to see it all even unto the goddamned last gory detail if some dismal robbery of the heart at dawn when no one cares like Sinatra sings.”
“-Not so much that I’m a drunkard that I feel guilty about but that others who occupy this plane of ‘life on earth’ with me don’t feel guilty at all-Crooked judges shaving and smiling in the morning on the way to their heinous indifferences, respectable generals ordering soldiers by telephone to go die or drop dead, pickpockets nodding in cells saying ‘I never hurt anybody,’ ‘that’s one thing you can say for me, yes sir,’ women who regard themselves saviors of men simply stealing their substance because they think their swan-rich necks deserve it anyway (though for every swan-rich neck you lose there’s another ten waiting, each ready to lay for a lemon), in fact awful hugefaced monsters of men just because their shirts are clean deigning to control the lives of working men by running for Governor saying, ‘Your tax money in my hands will be aptly used,’ ‘You should realize how valuable I am and how much you need me, without me what would you be, not led at all?’-Forward to the big designed mankind cartoon of a man standing facing the rising sun with strong shoulders with a plough at his feet, the necktied governor is going to make hay while the sun rises-?-I feel guilty for being a member of the human race-Drunkard yes and one of the worst fools on earth-In fact not even a genuine drunkard just a fool…”
-Big Sur
“I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.”
-Jack Kerouac in Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster by Steve Turner.
Conan O’Brien
“If life gives you lemons, make some kind of fruity juice.”
W.M. Lewis
“The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.”
Kurt Vonnegut
“Trout knew the honest working man had no use for the arts.”
-Breakfast of Champions
“Unusual ideas can create enemies… so they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines.”
-Breakfast of Champions when explaining why people are passive.
“During the Vietnam every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”
“Their beauty was to the beauty of Miss Canal Zone as the glory of the Sun was to the glory of a lightning bug.”
-The Sirens of Titan, describing the beauty of the sirens
“The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.”
-The Sirens of Titan
Robert A. Heilein
“All human behavior, all human motivations, all man’s hopes and fears, were colored and controlled by mankind’s tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction.”
“No good. It would be a waste of breath to tell a man who believes in guns that you’ve got something better.”
“Ownership is a sophisticated abstraction, a mystical relationship. God knows our legal theorists make this mystery complicated-but I didn’t dream how subtle it was until I got the Martian slant. Martians don’t own anything…not even their bodies.”
-A Stranger in a Strange Land
Ernest Hemingway
“The way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as there is you and colors and canvas,and to write as long as you can live and there is pencil and paper or ink or any machine to do it with, or anything you care to write about, and you feel a fool, to do it any other way. But here we were,now, caught in time, by the season, and by the running out of our money, so that what should have been as much fun to do each day whether you killed or not was being forced into that most exciting pervasion of life; the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should truly be allowed for its doing.”
-Green Hills of Africa
Carlos Castaneda (Don Juan’s Yaqui Way of Knowledge)
“For me there is only the traveling on the paths that have a heart, on any path that may have a heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge for me is to traverse its full length. And there I travel-looking, looking, breathlessly.”
“A path without a heart is never enjoyable … the path without a heart will turn against men and destroy them. It does not take much to die, and to seek death is to seek nothing.”
“If [man] gives in to fear he will never conquer it, because he will shy away from learning and never try again. But if he tries to learn for years in the midst of his fear, he will eventually conquer it because he will never have really abandoned himself to it.”
“Old age! If [man] gives in totally to his desire to lie down and forget, if he soothes himself in tiredness, he will have lost his last round, and his enemy will cut him down into a feeble old creature. His desire to retreat will overrule all his clarity, his power, and his knowledge.”
“A man is defeated only when he no longer tries, and abandons himself.”
“Man lives only to learn. And if he learns it is because that is the nature of his lot, for good or bad.”
“They were talking in Italian, and repeated over and over one phrase about the stupidity of sharks. I thought it was a logical, coherent topic. I had told don Juan earlier that the Colorado River in Arizona was called by the early Spaniards ‘el rio de los tizones [the river of charred wood]’; and someone misspelled or misread ‘tizones,’ and the river was called ‘el rio de los tiburones [the river of the sharks].’ I was sure they were discussing that story, yet it never occurred to me to think that none of them could speak Italian.”
-Carlos Castaneda describing his first peyote trip
William Faulkner
“When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excrutiating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you may forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosphers and fools.”
-The Sound and the Fury
From the movies:
Jim Beloushi: “What would you do? If you were stuck in one place? And every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”
Drunk: “That about sums it up for me.”
-Groundhog Day
Ash: “Maybe, just maybe my boys could pull it off. Yeah, and maybe I’m a Chinese jet pilot.”
-Army of Darkness
“Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable.”
-Wizard of Oz
McCroskey: “Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!”
-Airplane
Lev Andropov: “American components, Russian components, all made in Taiwan!”
-Armageddon
Capt. Steven Hiller: “Oh, no. No, you are NOT shootin’ that green shit at me!”
-Independence Day
Henry Wu: “You are saying that a group of animals, entirely composed of females, will breed?”
Ian Malcolm: “No, I am merely stating that uhh… life finds a way.”
-Jurassic Park
The Dude: “Yeah, well. The Dude abides.”
-The Big Lebowski
Sloan: “The city looks so peaceful from up here.”
Ferris: “Anything is peaceful from one thousand, three hundred and fifty-three feet.”
Cameron: “I think I see my dad.”
-Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Ulysses Everett McGill: “Only a fool looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.”
-O Brother Where Art Thou?
Topper Harley: “So … I guess you’ve been with a man before…”
Ramada: “I’m a virgin. I’m just not very good at it.”
-Hot Shots
Jimmy Dugan: “Are you crying? Are you crying? There’s no crying in baseball!”
-A League of Their Own
Chief DeFalco: “Heading sir?”
Captain Kirk: “Out there… thataway.”
-Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Dr. Friedrich von Frankenstein: “Igor, would you mind telling me whose brain I did put in?”
Igor: And you won’t be angry?”
Dr. Friedrich von Frankenstein: “I will NOT be angry.”
Igor: “Abby someone.”
Dr. Friedrich von Frankenstein: “Abby someone. Abby who?”
Igor: “Abby Normal.”
Dr. Friedrich von Frankenstein: “Abby Normal?”
Igor: “I’m almost sure that was the name.”
Dr. Friedrich von Frankenstein: “Do you mean to tell me that I put an abnormal brain into an, 8 foot tall, 300 pound, GORILLA?!”
-Young Frankenstein
“President Merkin Muffley: Gentlemen, you can’t fight here! This is the war room!”
-Dr. Strangelove
“Wayne: I would like the cream of ‘sum yung gai’ please”
-Wayne’s World
Roy Batty: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
Roy Batty: “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.”
-Blade Runner
Misc.
“The U.S. Embassy would be grateful if any of our friends who have information on terrorist activity or threats inform us between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. on Sunday through Thursday.”
-Sign outside the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan
