 From David Foster Wallace's
"Infinite Jest" (one of the best novels I've ever read, BTW):
"...you will become way less concerrned with what other people think of you
when you realize how seldom they do."
"...both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate a
person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e.
almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny
has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst
that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something
important you've tried to engineer."
From "Blackadder":
"As private parts to the gods are we, they play with us for their sport."
"I can't see the point of the theater. All that sex and violence. I get enough of
that at home. Except for the sex, of course."
"Oh, God, bills, bills, bills. One is born, one runs up bills and one dies....
Honestly, Baldric, sometimes I feel like a pelican. Whichever which way I turn I've still
got an enormous bill in front of me."
"'Just saddle the Prince's horse.'
'That'll be difficult. He wrapped around that lamp post in the
Strand last night.'
'Well, saddle my horse then.'
'What do you think you've been eating for the last two months?'
'Well go out into the street and hire me a horse!'
'Hire you a horse? For ninepence? On Jewish New Year in the rain?
A bare fortnight after the dreaded horse plague of Old London Town? With the blacksmiths'
strike in it's fifteenth week and the Dorset horse fetishists' fair tomorrow?'
'Well, put this on then.' (he tosses him a bridle) 'You look like
you could do with some exercise.'"
From "The Larry Sanders Show":
"Unethical? Larry, don't start pulling on that thread. Our whole world will
unravel."
The next couple of quotes are from Luke Rhinehart's book, "The Dice Man":
"We got married: society's solution to loneliness, lust, and laundry."
"Tell me the manner in which a patient commits suicide and I'll tell you how he can
be cured."
The
following are taken from "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter M. Miller, Jr.:
"Men must fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth, I think - as long as
they don't seize the error hungrily because it has a pleasanter taste."
"There were spaceships again in that century, and the ships were manned by fuzzy
impossibilities that walked on two legs and sprouted tufts of hair in unlikely anatomical
regions. They were a garrulous kind. ...It was a species which often considered itself to
be, basically, a race of divinely inspired toolmakers; any intelligent entity from
Arcturus would instantly have perceived them to be, basically, a race of impassioned
after-dinner speechmakers."
From
"Shibumi" by Trevanian:
"It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of the
postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn,
and is called "American" only because your nation is the most advanced case of
the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. It's
symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for
external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize
the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual
feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from
responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experience. In
the latter stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human
activities: fun. As for your food, no one denies that the Americans excel in one narrow
rubric: the snack. And I suspect there's something symbolic in that."
From Clifford Stoll's, "The Cuckoo's Egg," the
astronomer's rule of thumb:
"If you don't write it down,
it didn't happen."
From Tom Stoppard's,
"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead",
"People know what to expect and that is all they are prepared to believe in."
"We do on-stage what other people do off, which has a kind of integrity if you think
of every exit as an entrance somewhere else."
"The bad end unhappily, the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means."
"'Yes, I'm very fond of boats myself. I like the way they're contained. You don't
have to worry about which way to go or whether to go at all - the question doesn't arise,
does it? Because you're on a boat, aren't you? I think I'll spend the rest of my life on
boats.'
'Very healthy.'
'One is free on a boat. For a time. Relatively.'
'I think I'm going to be sick.'"
"All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner
of your eye, and when something lodges it into outline it's like being ambushed by a
grotesque."
R: We could play at questions.
G: What good would that do?
R: Practice!
G: Statement! One-love.
R: Cheating!
G: How?
R: I hadn't started yet.
G: Statement. Two-love.
R: Are you counting that?
G: What?
R: Are you counting that?
G: Foul! No repetitions. Three-love and game.
R: I'm not going to play if you're going to be like that.
G: Who's serve?
R: Hah?
G: Foul! No grunts. Love-one.
R: Who's go?
G: Why?
R: Why not?
G: What for?
R: Foul! No synonyms! One-all.
G: What in God's name is going on?
R: Foul! No rhetoric. Two-one.
G: What does it all add up to?
R: Can't you guess?
G: Were you addressing me?
R: Is there anyone else?
G: Who?
R: How would I know?
G: Why do you ask?
R: Are you serious?
G: Was that rhetoric?
R: No.
G: Statement! Two-all. Game point.
R: What's the matter with you today?
G: When?
R: What?
G: Are you deaf?
R: Am I dead?
G: Yes or no?
R: Is there a choice?
G: Is there a God?
R: Foul! No non sequiturs, three-two, one game all.
G: [seriously] What's your name?
R: What's yours?
G: I asked first.
R: Statement. One-love.
G: What's your name when you're at home?
R: What's yours?
G: When I'm at home?
R: Haven't you got one?
G: Why do you ask?
R: What are you driving at?
G: [with emphasis] What's your name?!
R: Repetition. Two-love. Match point to me.
G: [seizing him violently] WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
R: Rhetoric! Game and match!
From Dennis E. Bolen's "Stupid Crimes":
"Barry Delta knows he is not good with women. But what's the point in talking about
it? You talk about things you think you can fix, stuff that does not threaten your centre
and make you tell lies just to survive. There have been a number of women. Barry knows he
has become artistic about the acquiring.... The problem is after. The crooks all have
warrant expiry dates, a time when most of them will go away by statute; nothing solved or
explained, but simple. The women don't have warrant expiry dates. They have to expire
themselves some other way."
From Joseph Heller's, "Something Happened":
[On women and locations for sex] "I have since discovered that a thimble is room
enough when they really want to, and that the planet itself may prove too small when they
really don't."
From Joseph Heller's,
"Good as Gold",
"Gold was a moderate now in almost everything, advocating... fiery caution and
crusading inertia."
"Still, it's better to have shit to shoot at than nothing."
"'Don't you believe in original research any more?'...
'Unmistakably,' Gold answered. 'That's why I'm always so willing to use other
people's.'"
From Douglas Adams', "Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy":
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so."
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable
end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles
is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so
amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has - or had - a problem, which was this: most of the
people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were
suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of
small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green
pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most
of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big
mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the
trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man
had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a
change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what
was that had been going wrong for all this time, and she finally knew how the world could
be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would
have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone
about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.
This is not her story."
(Excerpt from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, page 634784, section 5a. Entry:
Magrathea)
"Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and
glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free.
Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, to seek adventure and reward among
the farthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were
high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha
Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave
unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split
before - and thus was the Empire forged.
Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly
natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor - at least no one
worth speaking of. And for the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably
became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault
of the worlds they'd settled on. None of them was entirely satisfactory: either the
climate wasn't quite right in the later part of the afternoon, or the day was half an hour
too long, or the sea was exactly the wrong shade of pink.
And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of
specialist industry: custom-made luxury planet building. The home of this industry was the
planet Magratheawhere hyper spatial engineers sucked matter throughwhite holes in space to
form it into dream planets - gold planets, platinum planets, soft rubber planets with lots
of earthquakes - all lovingly made to meet the exacting standards that the Galaxy's
richest men naturally came to expect.
But so successful was this venture that Magrathea itself soon
became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject
poverty. And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence
settled over a billion hungry worlds, disturbed only by the pen scratchings of scolars as
they laboured into the night over smug little treatises on the value of a planned
political economy.
Magrathea itself disappeared and its memory soon passed into the
obscurity of legend.
In these enlightened days, of course, no one believes a word of
it."
From "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe"
"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to
pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and
Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases.
For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question
'How can we eat?', the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the
question, 'Where shall we have lunch?'"
"I teleported home one night
With Ron and Sid and Meg.
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg."
"Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was - indeed, is - one
of the Universe's very small number of immortal beings.
Most of those who are born immortal instinctively know how to
cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed, he had come to hate them, the
load of serene bastards. He had had his immortality inadvertently thrust upon him by an
unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of
rubber bands. The precise details of the accident are not important because no one has
ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people
have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.
...To begin with it was fun; he had a ball, living dangerously,
taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield, long-term investments, and just generally
outliving the hell out of everybody.
In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with,
and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know you've
taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any
given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary
new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move
relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the
soul."
"Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of
understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an
absolute but depended on the observer's movement in time, and that time was not an
absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in space, so it is now realized that
numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.
The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the
table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to
the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually
turn up, or to the number of people who subsequently join them after the
show/match/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has
turned up.
The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which
is now known to be one of those most bizarre of mathmatical concepts, a
recipriversexcluon, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other
than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment in time at which
it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. ...
The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all
lies in the relationship between the number of items on the check, the cost of each item,
the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number
of people who have actually brought any money is only a subphenomenon in this field.)
The baffling discrepencies that used to occur at this point
remained uninvestigated for centuries simply because no one took them seriously. They were
at the time put down to such things as politeness, rudeness, meanness, flashiness,
tiredness, emotionality or the lateness of the hour, and completely forgotten about on the
following morning. They were never tested under laboratory conditions, of course, because
they never occurred in laboratories - not in reputable laboratories at least.
And so it was only with the advent of pocket computers that the
startling truth became finally apparent, and it was this:
Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of
restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other
pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.
This single statement took the scientific world by storm. It
completely revolutionized it. So many mathmatical conferences got held in such good
restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart
failure and the science of math was put back by years.
Slowly, however, the implications of the idea began to be
understood. To begin with it had been too stark, too crazy, too much like what the man in
the street would have said "Oh, yes, I could have told you that." Then some
phrases like "Interactive Subjectivity Frameworks" were invented, and everybody
was able to relax and get on with it.
From The Dead Milkmen's, "Stuart":
"You know what, Stuart? I like you. You're not like the
other people here in the trailer park. Oh, don't get me wrong. They're fine people,
they're good Americans. But they're content to sit back, maybe watch a little Mork and
Mindy on channel 57, maybe kick back a cool Coors 16 ouncer. They're good, fine people,
Stuart, but they don't know what the queers are doing to the soil.
You know that Donny Warsden kid? The kid who delivers papers in
the neighborhood? He's a fine kid. Some of the neighbors say he smokes crack but I don't
believe it. Anyway, for his tenth birthday all he wanted was a burrow owl. Kept buggin'
his old man, "Dad, get me a burrow owl. I'll never ask for anything else as long as I
live." So the guy breaks down and buys him a burrow owl. Anyway, 10:30 the other
night I go out into my yard and there's the Warsden kid lookin' up in the trees. I said,
"What are you looking for?" He said, "I'm looking for my burrow owl."
I said, "Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick!! Everybody knows the burrow owl lives in a
hole in the ground! Why the hell do think they call it a burrow owl anyway?!" Now
Stuart, do you think a kid like that is going to know what the queers are doing to the
soil?!
I first became aware of all this about ten years ago, the summer
my oldest boy, Bill Jr. died. You know that carnival that comes to town every year? Well,
that year they came through with a ride called "The Mixer." The man said,
"Keep your head and arms inside The Mixer at all times." But Bill Jr., he was a
daredevil, just like his old man. He was leaning out saying, "Hey, everybody! Look at
me! Look at me!" Pal, he was decapitated! They found his head over by the Sno-Cone
concession! A few days after that I opened up the mail and there's a pamphlet in there
from Pueblo, Colorado, and it's addressed to Bill Jr., and it's entitled, "Do You
Know What the Queers are Doing to Our Soil?"!!!
Now, Stuart! If you look at the soil around any large U.S. city
with a big underground homosexual population... Des Moines, Iowa. Perfect example! Look at
the soil around Des Moines, Stuart! You can't build on it, you can't grow anything in it.
The government says it's due to poor farming. But I know what's really going on, Stuart!
It's the queers! They're in it with the aliens! They're building landing strips for gay
Martians!! I swear to God!!!
I like you, Stuart. You're not like the other people here in the
trailer park."
From
"Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco:
"I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments,
when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom."
"In those halycon days I believed that the source of enigma was stupidity. Then... I
decided that the most terrible enigmas are those that mask themselves as madness. But now
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made
terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying
truth."
From Martin Amis' "London Fields"
"In his bachelor days Keith had been a regular romeo. He had been a real ladykiller.
In truth, he had been quite a one. ...Then came change, and responsibilities: Kath, his
wife, and their baby girl, little Kim. And now it was all different. These days Keith kept
a leash on his restless nature, restricting himself to the kind of evanescent romance that
might come the way of any modern young businessman on his travels (the wife or sister or
daughter or mother of some cheat in the East End, perhaps, where Keith went to get the
perfume), plus the occassional indiscretion rather closer to home (Iqbala, the single
parent in the next flat along), plus the odd chance encounter made possible when fortune
smiles on young lovers (closing time, pub toilet), plus three regular and longstanding
girlfriends, Trish Shirt, Debbee Kensit, who was special, and Analiese Furnish. And that
was it."
"On the whole he found posh skirt shockingly arrogant in bed, always wanting to get
on top and other rubbish, and often drawing the line, if you please, at some of Keith's
most favoured stunts. There was, for instance, that mad bitch in South Ken. Miranda. She
was at least forty, and a wild one. Single in those days, Keith had spent many a night in
her mews bedroom being oiled and teased and clawed. It went on all summer and Keith nursed
high hopes of the relationship: a car, maybe, a cash gift or at least a loan. But he went
off her, right off her, after she got the police around that time, when Keith paid a call
on her one night, with some pals. All right, it was late (he remembered switching the car
lights off on the way there), and - okay - things were taken (namely goods, drink and
liberties) and it looked bad for a minute there when they formed the queue behind him. But
to scream so loud the neighbors called the filth in: that was betrayal. Soon after that
she changed her number and went away for a while. Keith was still in a state of high
indignation when he showed up with the van and the boys (the same boys) and started
bitterly stripping the house.
From William Gibson's "Mona Lisa Overdrive":
"'You ever see a Fujiwara HE fléchette? Hits something
hard, it goes off. Hits something soft, like most of you, buddy, it goes in, then it goes
off. Ten seconds later.'
'Why?'
'So you get time to think about it.'"
"The world hadn't ever had so many moving parts or so few labels."
- from "Virtual Light":
"How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only knew for the first time that
you’d ever had them. ... You didn’t wake up every morning and say yes and yes to
every little thing. But little things were what it was all made of."
From Tom Robbins' "Still Life with Woodpecker":
"Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the
top."
"Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to
humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without
immediate excrutiation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from
the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify
Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It's
not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of
the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightening."
From Grant Naylor's "Red Dwarf Omnibus":
"It had taken the crew of Nova 5 six months to find a blue
supergiant - a star teetering on the edge of its final phase in the right quadrant of the
right galaxy. Another month and they would have ruined the campaign. They certainly felt
they had good reason to celebrate.
Sipping her champagne Kirsty Fantozi, the star demolition
engineer, started programming the nebulon missle. It had to explode at just the right
moment to trigger off the reaction in the star's core which would push it to the supernova
stage. A star in supernova would light up the entire galaxy for over a month, giving off
more energy than the Earth's sun could in ten billion years. It would be a hell of a bang.
One undetected bug in Fantozi's programming could ruin
everything. Not only did she have to push the star into supernova, she had to time it so
the light from the explosion would reach Earth at exactly the right moment. The right
moment was the same moment as the light from the other one hundred and twenty-seven
supergiants, which were also being induced into supernovae, reached Earth.
For anyone living on Earth, the result would be mind-fizzingly
spectacular. One hundred and twenty-eight stars would appear to go supernova
simultaneously, burning with such ferocity they would be visible even in daylight.
And the one hundred twenty-eight supernova would spell out a
message.
And this would be the message:
'COKE ADDS LIFE!'
For five whole weeks, wherever you were on Earth, the huge tattoo
would be branded across the day and night skies.
Honeymooners in Hawaii would stand on the peak of Mauna Kea,
gazing at sunsets stamped with the slogan. Commuters in London, stuck in traffic jams,
would peer through the grey drizzle and gape at the Cola constellation. The few primitive
tribes still untouched by civilization in the jungles of South America would look up at
the heavens, and certainly not think about Pepsi.
The cost of this single, three-word ad in star writing across the
universe would amount to the entire military budget of the USA for the whole of history.
So, ridiculous though it was, it was still a marginally more
sensible way of blowing trillions of dollarpounds.
And, the Coke executives were assured by the advertising
executives at Saachi, Saachi, Saachi, Saachi, Saachi and Saachi, it would put an end to
the Cola war forever. Guaranteed, Pepsi would be buried.
OK, it wasn't wonderful, ecologically speaking. OK, it involved
the destruction of a hundred and twenty-eight stars, which otherwise would have lasted
another twenty-five million years or so. OK, when the stars exploded they would gobble up
three or four planets in each of their solar systems. And, OK, the resulting radiation
would last long past the lifetime of our own planet.
But it sure as hell would sell a lot of cans of a certain fizzy
drink.
From Monty Python's Flying Circus:
"'I think that all right-thinking people in this country are
sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up in this country with
being sick and tired!'
'No, you're not.'
'I'm certainly not! But I'm sick and tired of being told that I
am!'"
"It's like murder - make a thing illegal and it acquires a mystique. Look at arson. I
mean, how many of us can honestly say that at one time or another he hasn't set fire to
some great public building. I know I have."
"...because Kilimanjaro is a pretty tricky climb you know, most of it is up until you
reach the very, very top, and then it tends to slope away rather sharply."
"'This is a vegetarian restaurant only, we serve no animal
flesh of any kind. We're not only proud about that, we're smug about it. So if you were to
come in here asking me to rip open a small defenceless chicken, so you could chew its skin
and eat its intestines, then I'm afraid I'd have to ask you to leave.'
'No, no, no, no.'
'Likewise if you were to ask us to slice the sides of a cow and
serve it with small pieces of its liver... or indeed drain the life blood from a pig
before cutting off one of its legs... or carve the living giblets from a sheep and serve
them with the fresh brains, bowels, guts, and spleen of a small rabbit... WE WOULDN'T DO
IT. Not for food, anyway.'"
"Quite frankly I'm against people who give vent to their loquacity by extraneous
bombastic circumlocution."
Ben Elton, from "This Other Eden":
"Everything is fascinating when you should be working."
"Then the prevarication began again. What style of computer
font to employ? What type size? Word processing had increased the opportunities for writer
prevarication considerably. Nathan was still playing around with his computer mouse
fifteen minutes later, when the doorbell rang. He jumped up in delight. Here was a genuine
diversion. ...
The world is full of quite awesomely boring people who knock on
doors. Often they are religious zealots, sometimes political representatives, occasionally
market researchers. Normally, the reaction that these sad door knockers provoke is one of
brusque dismissal. Most people make it quite clear that they resent the intrusion on their
privacy and that they neither wish to be told what to think, nor asked what they think.
Indeed, so thankless is the lot of the average boring door knocker that it is a mystery
how they keep going. The truth, of course, is that every job, even door knocking, has its
occasional rewards. Every now and then, not often, very rarely, in fact, but sometimes,
the boring door knocker knocks on the door of someone who is pleased to see them. ...It is
these seemingly generous, open-spirited souls who keep the boring door knockers going, for
in them exists the great door knocker's illusion. The illusion that somebody out there
appreciates them. ...Alas, it is only an illusion. For the people who encourage them do so
out of purely selfish reasons. For they are writers merely seeking further justification
to prevaricate. Desperate people, every one, who would welcome a burglar into their homes
as a happy diversion from having to sit down and do some work."
Bruce Jay Friedman, "A Mother's Kisses":
"It was the word 'death,' actually, that frightened him more than anything. He
thought the whole idea might not be too bad if there were another term for it, such as
'whiffle.'"
Some Swift (don't know which piece it's from):
"...it is with writers as it is with wells; a person with good eyes may see the
bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there; and often, when there is nothing in
the world at the bottom, beside dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and half under
ground, it shall pass, however, for wondrous deep, upon no wiser reason than because it is
wondrous dark."
From
"Tantrum" by Jules Feiffer:
1. Get the grades but don't trust what they teach you.
2. Don't tell them what you're thinking; they'll use it against you.
3. Never be rational if you want to have your way.
4. Ignore logic; it'll cripple your spirit.
5. Look out for abandonment by your loved ones.
6. Don't be horny after marriage.
7. Don't mature. Mature people do the shit work.
From
"The Throat" by Peter Straub:
"'Aren't you making a lot of assumptions?'
'Assumptions are what I have to work with. I might as well enjoy
them.'"
From the
song, "Any Other Way" from the disk, Dear 23, by The
Posies:
"She left me alone, claiming we'd run out of things to fight about.
I was crushed of course, but at least I've something I can write about."
From
"The Hippopotamus" by Stephen Fry:
"She sketched a short autobiography, enough to show me that she wasn't as bright or
pretty or stylish or interesting as she had seemed sitting at the bar. But then, no one
ever is, which is why it's always worth having shares in whiskey and cosmetics."
"Her mind, like her face, was fully made up."
"...in the tennis score of the bedroom most girls in my experience would rather Love
Thirty or Love Forty than Love Fifteen. Men, of course, are a whole other issue: they
start at Love All and stay there until they're dragged from the court."
"...never, ever tell a man he is cynical. Cynical is the name we give those we fear
may be laughing at us."
Gunter Grass, "The Tin Drum":
"What novel - or what else in the world - can have the epic scope of a photograph
album? May our Father in Heaven, the untiring amateur who each Sunday snaps us from above,
at an unfortunate angle that makes for hideous foreshortening, and pastes our pictures,
properly exposed or not, in His album, guide me safely through this album of mine..."
From Kim Stanley Robinson's book of short stories, "The
Planet on the Table". The story is called "Lucky Strike":
"...he saw what these young men would grow up to be like as clearly as if they stood
before him in businessmen's suits, prosperous and balding. They would be tough and capable
and thoughtless, and as the years passed and the great war receded in time they would look
back on it with ever-increasing noastalgia, for they would be the survivors and not the
dead. Every year of this war would feel like ten in their memories, so that the war would
always remain the central experience of their lives - a time when history lay palpable in
their hands, when each of their daily acts affected it, when moral issues were simple, and
others told them what to do - so that as more years passed and the survivors aged, bodies
falling apart, lives in one rut or another, they would unconsciously push harder and
harder to thrust the world into war again, thinking somewhere inside themselves that if
they could only return to world war then they would magically be again as they were in the
last one - young, and free, and happy. And by that time they would hold the positions of
power, they would be capable of doing it."
From
"Heavenly Bank Account", off of Frank Zappa's
album "You Are What You Is". A warning against tv evangelists:
"Remember, there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over." |
