"If morons could fly, the sky would be pitch black."
—Red Eldorado
"Those unaware are unaware of being unaware."
—Merrill Jenkins
"What you are, I once was. What I am, you will so be."
—Unknown (carved upon a gravestone)
Any idiot can face a crisis—it's this day-to-day living that wears you out."
—Anton Chekhov
"In the land of the blind, one eye is king."
—Unknown
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
—Blaise Pascal
"The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly deceived."
—Oscar Wilde
"All of life is a symphony of successive losses. You lose your youth, your parents, your loves, your friends, your comforts, your health, and finally your life. To deny loss is to lose it all anyway and to lose, in addition, your self-possession and your peace of mind."
—Siever Gennar, Nemesis, by Isaac Asimov
"I have nothing against your Christ. I am sure his blood tasted as sweet as anyone else's."
—Poppy Z. Brite
"I was born alive ... isn't that punishment enough?"
—Clive Barker (Cabal)
"Do what thou wilt is the whole of the Law."
—Aliester Crowley
"Nothing is true; everything is permitted."
—Hassan i Sabbah
"...and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being...All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one, single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone...There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing..."
—Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho)
"No writer has any secrets. It's all in (their) work."
—William S. Burroughs
"...The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don't even have a word for love—that is, a word for love apart from physical attraction or sex. And this separation of love and sex is a western concept, a Christian concept."
—William S. Burroughs
"Sex times technology equals the future."
—J. G. Ballard
"I think that the United States are finished, now...The great power of America in the past, really was psychological...it offered a new way of life. The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam..."
—J. G. Ballard, 1983 interview
"Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game? A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction."
—J. G. Ballard
"No good deed goes unpunished."
—Claire Booth Luce
"Jesus Saves. So do condoms."
—Anonymous
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If they're any good you'll have to ram them down peoples' throats."
—Joe Dimaggio, (Original author unknown)
"Yes, I know my enemies. They're the teachers who taught me to fight me. Compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission, ignorance, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite. All of which are American Dreams."
—Zach de la Rocha (Know Your Enemy)
"Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red."
—Clive Barker (Books of Blood)
"Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl..."
—Abdul Alhazred (The Necronomicon)
"If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Aye, and what then?"
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Anima Poetae)
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
—Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)
"...if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
—Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
"Hell is the place of those who have denied;
They find there what they planted and what dug,
A Lake of Spaces, and a Wood of Nothing,
And wander there and drift, and never cease
wailing for substance."
—W. B. Yeats (The Hour Glass)
"The Devil is by no means the worst that there is; I would rather have dealings with him than with many a human being. He honours his agreements much more promptly than many a swindler on Earth. To be true, when payment is due he comes on the dot, just as twelve strikes, fetches his soul and goes off home to Hell like a good Devil. He's just a businessman as is right and proper."
—J. N. Nestroy (Hollenangst)
"Civilisations do not degenerate through fear, but because they forget that fear exists."
—Freya Stark (Perseus in the Wind)
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."
—Voltaire (Epitre a M. Saurin, 10 Novembre 1770)
"I do not agree with a word you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
—Voltaire
"He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder."
—M. C. Escher
"When you see the crowd going one way, run like hell in the other direction."
—Charles Bukowski
"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives."
—Abba Eban
"Once you cut people open, you find out that they're all pretty much the same inside."
—city mortician
"That is not dead which can eternal lie; And with strange aeons even death may die."
—Abdul Alhazred, Necronomicon
(from H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", 1926)
"These revels are now ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into the air, into thin air: And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind, We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
—William Shakespeare (The Tempest)
"We are ne'er like angels till our passion dies."
—Thomas Dekker (The Honest Whore)
"You claimed all this time that you would die for me. Why then are you so surprised when you hear your own eulogy?"
—Maynard James Keenan (Eulogy)
"See the monkey's eyes. Look deep into the monkey's eyes as he comes to you smiling. Day after day the monkey's eyes become bigger and bigger. Soon the monkey's eyes are all you can see. Soon the monkey's eyes become your eyes. You feel the monkey's bite. Monkey see, monkey do, monkey will destroy you."
—Henry Rollins (Another Life)
