LOWER YOUR PRICE

Not Quite Human II (1989)

White Palace (1990)

Found my other half

dollar, under the cushions,

fresh from the couch mint.

Paris, Texas (1984)

Vigil (1984)

"... and suddenly he began to laugh. 'That's what I'm supposed to do, isn't? If there are certain preconditions for the use of magic, those preconditions will inevitably arrange themselves. Right?'"

It, Stephen King

Paris, Texas (1984)

"He hadn't been very good at first; he was too excited to be good. But he had understood his potential not to be just good at the job but great at it, and just that knowledge had been enough to put him over the moon on a cloud of euphoria. At the same time he had begun to understand the great principle that moved the universe, at least that part of the universe which had to do with careers and success: you found the crazy guy who was running around inside of you, fucking up your life. You chased him into a corner and grabbed him. But you didn't kill him. Oh no. You put a harness over his head and then started plowing. The crazy guy worked like a demon once you had him in the traces. And he supplied you with a few chucks from time to time. That was really all there was. And that was enough."

It, Stephen King

"Offended, yes. It was the only word he could think of, and if he used it they would laugh--they liked him, he knew that, and they had accepted him as one of them, but they would still laugh. All the same, there were things that were not supposed to be. They offended any sane person's sense of order, they offended the central idea that God had given the earth a final tilt on its axis so that twilight would only last about twelve minutes at the equator and linger for an hour or more up where the Eskimos built their ice-cube houses, that He had done that and He then had said, in effect: 'Okay, if you can figure out the tilt, you can figure out any damn thing you choose. Because even light has weight, and when the note of a train whistle suddenly drop it's the Doppler effect and when an airplane breaks the sound barrier that bang isn't the applause of the angels or the flatulence of demons but only air collapsing back into place. I gave you the tilt and then I sat back about halfway up the auditorium to watch the show. I got nothing else to say, except that two and two makes four, the lights in the sky are stars, if there's blood grownups can see it as well as kids, and dead boys stay dead.' You can live with fear, I think, Stan would have said if he could. Maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. It's offense you maybe can't live with, because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look there, and they have little yellow eyes that don't blink, and there's a stink down in that dark, and after awhile you think maybe there's a whole other universe down there, a universe where a square moon rises in the sky and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some of them have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on water, but if I saw a guy doing that I'd scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn't look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense."

It, Stephen King

silly ways to die

"at every turn, playing their own part, unwitting vise grips driving the seven of them together--tight, tighter, tightest."

It, Stephen King

Damned If You Don't (1987)

Hester Street (1975)

a gravitationally completely collapsed object (the return to innocence)

"Well, after you've used the phrase 'a gravitationally completely collapsed object' ten times you conclude you've got to get a better name. So that's when I switched to the word 'black hole'."

John Archibald Wheeler, A Brief History of Time (1991)

"No... no, I don't think that. But... 

But what? that rational side of his mind demanded, and Mike thought it was talking just a little too loud, a little too fast. Even if there was still something to find, it would have decayed long ago. So... what?"

It, Stephen King

STEPHEN HAWK-KING

A Brief History of Time (1991)

"The fog changed everything, made the most ordinary things like fire hydrants and stop-signs into objects of mystery--things both strange and a trifle sinister. You could hear cars but not see them, and because of the fog's odd acoustic quality, you could not tell if they were far or near until you actually saw them come rolling out of the fog with ghost-halos of moisture ringing their headlamps."

It, Stephen King

"And yet some rationality remained, even until the end: as the Creature hooked its claws into the soft meat of his neck, as his carotid artery let go in a warm and painless gout that splashed the thing's reptilian plating, Eddie's hands groped at the Creature's back, feeling for a zipper. They fell away only when the Creature tore his head from his shoulders with a low satisfied grunt. 

And as Eddie's picture of what It was began to fade, It began promptly to change into something else."

It, Stephen King

New York Stories (1989) 

" 'cause what do you give a girl that has nothing, you know, that doesn't need anything, right? you give her comfort, right?"

"The Cadillac Hotel," Snap Judgement, 07.27.2017.

"Yet there was something in the concept of haiku that fired his imagination. The idea made him feel happy... Haiku was good poetry, Ben felt, because it was structured poetry. There were no secret rules. Seventeen syllables, one image linked to one emotion, and you were out. Bingo. It was clean, it was utilitarian, it was entirely contained within and dependent upon its own rules. He even liked the word itself, a slide of air broken as if along a dotted line by the 'k'-sound at the very back of your mouth: haiku."

It, Stephen King

Some nights I just play black-jack.

Rain Man (1988) 

"(for some reason this last caused another wave of feeling to sweep him so powerfully he had to grope for the railing again; the feeling was huge, inarticulate, mercifully brief; perhaps a sexual pre-signal, meaningless to his body, where the endocrine glands still slept almost without dreaming, yet as bright as summer heat-lightning) a bright golden anklet-bracelet she wore..."

It, Stephen King

"Team Homer," The Simpsons (1995)

"My mother was not a person but the climate I grew up in."

1982 Janine, Alasdair Gray

An Angel at My Table (1990)

the sun can't be seen
behind our backs while we sleep,
radiating heat

Under the surface
of an extinguishing core,
from remnants are mined

the membrane, stripped off
like vinyl from a billboard
when the bond pays out.

Takes one year no more
to become expert at this
manual labor.

Protein-rich membranes
are dried, powdered, and processed.
Sold as supplements

to heal busted joints,
lasting muscle contracture,
palmar fascia.

"There was very little in the place, mostly it was furnished with light and quiet. It was on the top floor and looked out over rooftops. There was a Chinese teapot in the kitchen, there was a copy of Lilly's The Mind of the Dolphin on the table by the bed. In the sitting room were R. H. Blyth's four volumes on haiku and some natural history. 'I don't buy books much anymore,' he said. There was a radio but no gramophone."

Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban

"I stretched out my hands, thought of holding the grey air cool and wet in my hands."

Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban

chased a lost dog back to its home

Just One of the Guys (1985)

"I don't want to be naked with anybody now, especially with myself."

Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban

"Is it possible that they made wishes here when they threw in their coins?"

Trust (1991)

Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban

"The model houses and shops, thick and awry, had an air of stolid outrage. It was as if the anima of each place, private and indwelling, had been nagged into standing naked in the little streets before the deformed buildings. As if someone had said, 'We need the money, you must help.' the very boats in the model harbour, oafish and out of scale in the still water, cursed almost aloud, denied any connection whatever with real boats, fishing and the sea, tried by disassociating themselves to make amends to the poor household gods of the port."

Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban

"They were playing a tournament, twelve players, twelve matches a day, twelve days running. When that was over and the victor had been crowned, they'd play another one."

Drop City, T. C. Boyle

"And then he was there, by the tree with its black skirts of tightly woven needles and the bark that smelled of pitch, of air freshener and Pine-Sol, and saw that there was no moose, wounded or otherwise, lying heaped in the snow. He heard a sudden sharp heartrending cry then, the cry of a human baby spitted by some fiend on the point of a bayonet, and looked down at his feet. There was something there, a black weakly thrashing living form, a thing he'd shot while it clung to the bark of the tree eight feet from the ground, impersonating the head of a moose. And what was it? weak and bristling, the life sucking out of the hole he'd put in it--a porcupine, that's what it was, the humped and hobbling old man of the woods, fit only to feed to the dogs. 

For a long moment he stood there, watching the thing thrash its spiked head against the ground, back and forth, back and forth, a metronome keeping time with its agony and its unbelief-or was that its tail? All the while, the dark thumping kept time to the beat of his own unavailing blood. He felt foolish, felt lost and hopeless and incompetent, felt ashamed, felt guilty. ..."

Drop City, T. C. Boyle

 

Wolves: A Legend Returns to Yellowstone (2007)

"And then a voice she recognized, knew so intimately it was as if she were speaking herself: 'Come on, Norm, come on, man, don't let us down.' It was Ronnie, across the room, his face pinched and his eyes swollen in his head. He looked terrible. Looked as if he'd been buried a week and dug up again. But that voice, that tone--there was something raw and desperate in it, a quaver she recognized from all those late-night disquisitions on God, the futility of life an how impossible it was to find a good FM station in the flatlands, and she understood in that moment how much all this meant to him. Ronnie. Pan. He needed Drop City as much as she did. 'Come on, Norm,' he nagged. 'Come on.'"

Drop City, T. C. Boyle

"I'm not a very good cinema spectator. I become very, very impatient very, very quickly. I don't know whether you're going to believe me, but the last time I went into a cinema, came into the box office, bought a ticket, sat down in the dark for a 120 minutes and stayed there to the bitter end would be David Lynch's Blue Velvet. That was a long, long time ago... ...it's related to being a practicing filmmaker, I don't want to watch other people's films, I wanna make my own films!"

Peter Greenaway, "Peter Greenaway on his filmmaking style & career, A Life in Pictures," BAFTA

"They didn't want to save children, they wanted to be children."

Drop City, T. C. Boyle

"he was back on the river, moving with the current, moving fast"

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Drop City, T. C. Boyle

("Believe me, there is just barely enough goodness in all of this.")

"There was no foundation, no hidden closet, nothing built into the thin walls. On the whole, it was the kind of house that would stand even years after Moses died, held up by the tribal imagination. Driving by, the Indians would look across the field toward the house and hold it upright with their eyes, remembering Moses lived there. 

It would be just enough to ensure survival."

"A Good Story," The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie

Wild Yellowstone (2015)

"this child of mine who doesn't cry or recognize the human being in his own body."

("I want to walk circles around James getting closer and closer to him in a new dance and a better kind of healing which could make James talk and all before he learns to cry.") 

"Jesus Christ's Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation," The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie

"'Victor, I'm sorry about your father,' Thomas said. 

'How did you know about it?' Victor asked. 

'I heard it on the wind. I heard it from the birds. I felt it in the sunlight. Also, your mother was just in here crying.'"

"This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona," The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie

hum wast (Fantastic Voyage, 1966)

"The conversation went on like that, perfunctorily. The magic was gone. It was as if we'd broken the ice but the frigid waters had made us slow and phony with hypothermia. I'd missed my chance, I reckoned, to be her real friend. Rebecca had opened the door to me and I'd shut it in her face. I was boring. I had nothing to contribute."

Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh

"I put up with him for a while because I thought maybe he was pointing to some dark truth about myself, and I suppose he was. I was a fool to be with a man like him. I was a fool about men in general. I learned the long way about love, tried every house on the block before I got it right. Now, finally, I live alone."

Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh

"That was my dinner. It took me years to learn how to feed myself properly, or rather it took years to develop the desire to feed myself properly. Back there in X-ville, I desperately hoped I could avoid every having to resemble a grown woman. I didn't see that any good could come of that."

Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh

"Was I not worthy of something better?"

Carrie (1976)

Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh

"I will say this about houses. Those perfect, neat colonials I'd passed earlier that evening on my way through X-ville are the death masks of normal people. Nobody is really so orderly, so perfect. To have a house like that says more about what's wrong with you than any decrepit dump. Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses. I knew this implicitly at age twenty-four. Of course at twenty-four I was also obsessed with death. I had tried to distract myself from my terror not through housekeeping, like housewives of X-ville, but through my bizarre eating, compulsive habits, tireless ambivalence, Randy and so forth. I hadn't realized this until sitting at Rebecca's kitchen table, watching her crack open a peanut, lick her fingers: I would die one day, but not yet. There I was."

Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh

"That was how I imagined my anatomy back then, brain like tangled yarn, body like an empty vessel, private parts like some strange foreign country."

Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh

Henry Fool (1997)

"He hands me the pen and points. I make a puddle of my name on one, and scratch something on the other. Foster holds my wrist for the third."

McGlue, Ottessa Moshfegh

"'Just fuck the world and get on, Nick,' he says. 

I ask him to repeat himself. 

'I said, fuck the world.' 

It sounds all right coming out of his mouth. The word 'world' rears around like something brewerful. Like something I could swallow and burp and taste and get all up in me and sick of, and I think, eat, I'll fuck it. My head hurts suddenly. I ask Johnson for a tablet and he dumps the vial out into his palm and picks one up between his fingers and says, 'Open up,' and I stick my tongue out, and he sets the tablet on it--quaking, steaming tongue there, feed me, and it's bitter, and my tongue shirks and scoots and tucks back and something stills in me and something's something I don't know what and I don't care and it's good."

McGlue, Ottessa Moshfegh

"He says he took me for a kid like fifteen the night he found me and thought himself a real hero."

Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)

McGlue, Odessa Moshfegh

The Escape Artist (1982)

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990)

"Another shadow, that of my friend, also fell across my soul. It never left me--because I myself did not wish to leave it. 

But of that shadow I never spoke to anyone. I talked to it in private, and, thanks to it, was becoming reconciled with death. I have my secret bridge to the other side. When my friend's soul crossed the bridge, I felt it was weary and pale; it was too weak to shake my hand."

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

"And when I'm not working, I'm not working at all, although during those periods of full stop I usually feel at loose ends with myself and have trouble sleeping."

On Writing, Stephen King

The Pillow Book (1996)

"'...he burnt the second I lit the candle at the lamp of Christ. I saw him with my own eyes come out of my mouth like a black ribbon with letters of fire. The flame from the candle fell on him and he writhed like a snake, but was burnt to ashes....'"

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

School Ties (1992)

"As a child, then, I had almost fallen into the well. When grown up, I nearly fell into the word 'eternity,' and into quite a number of other words too--'love,' 'hope,' 'country,' 'God.' As each word was conquered and left behind I had the feeling that I had escaped a danger and made some progress. But no, I was only changing words and calling it deliverance. And there I had been, for the last two years, hanging over the edge of the word 'Buddha.' 

... Buddha will be the last well of all, the last word precipice, and then I shall be delivered forever. Forever? That is what we say each time."

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantsakis

"...the old woman made a muffled growl like a churlish dog on a chain. But she didn't say a word."

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

"How disquieting it is to walk alone by the sea! Each wave, each bird in the sky calls to you and reminds you of your duty."

The Blues Brothers (1980) 

"The unfailing rhythm of the seasons, the ever-turning wheel of life, the four facets of the earth which are lit in turn by the sun, the passing of life--all these filled me once more with a feeling of oppression. Once more there sounded within me, together with the cranes' cry, the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other, and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chance will be given to us."

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

"Century-old memories of magic ceremonies"

The Big Chill (1983)

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

"'It is essential that your conscience guards vigilantly against this weakness: excessive sensitivity concerning vain exterior graces.'"

The Escape Artist (1982)

"I closed the book, opened it again, and finally threw it down. For the first time in my life it all seemed bloodless, odorless, void of any human substance. Pale-blue, hollow words in a vacuum. Perfectly clear distilled water without any bacteria, but also without any nutritive substances. Without life.  

In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls. Something similar had happened to this poetry. The ardent aspirations of the heart, laden with earth and seed, had become a flawless intellectual game, a clever, aerial and intricate architecture. 

... The human element is brutish, uncouth, impure--it is composed of love, the flesh and a cry of distress. Let it be sublimated into an abstract idea, and, in the crucible of the spirit, by various processes of alchemy, let it be rarefied and evaporate."

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis
The Red and the Black, Stendhal (M-H B)

"I whistled to conceal my emotion."

Cable Guy (1996)

"I was happy and said to myself: 'This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To take part in the Christmas festivities and, after eating and drinking well, to escape on your own far from all the snares, to have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right: and to realize of a sudden that, in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.'"

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

Cronos (1993)

"'Tell me what you do with the food you eat, and I'll tell you who you are. Some turn their food into fat and manure, some into work and good humor, and others, I'm told, into God. So there must be three sorts of men. I'm not one of the worst, boss, nor yet one of the best. I'm somewhere between the two. What I eat I turn into work and good humor. That's not too bad, after all!' 

He looked at me wickedly and started laughing. 

'As for you, boss,' he said, 'I think you do your level best to turn what you eat into God. But you can't quite manage it, and that torments you. The same thing's happening to you as happened to the crow.' 

'What happened to the crow, Zorba?' 

'Well, you see, he used to walk respectably, properly--well, like a crow.  But one day he got it into his head to try to strut about like a pigeon. And from that time on the poor fellow couldn't for the life of him recall his own way of walking. He was all mixed up, don't you see? He just hobbled about.'"

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

"The stars were shining, the sea was sighing and licking the shells, a glow-worm lit under its belly its little erotic lantern. Night's hair was streaming with dew. 

I lay face downward, plunged in silence, thinking of nothing. I was now one with night and the sea; my mind was like a glow-worm that had lit its little lantern and settled on the damp, dark earth, and was waiting. 

The stars were traveling round, the hours were passing--and, when I arose, I had, without knowing how, engraved on my mind the double task I had to accomplish on this shore: 

Escape from Buddha, rid myself of words of all my metaphysical cares and free my mind from vain anxiety; 

Make direct and firm contact with men, starting from this very moment. 

I said to myself: 'Perhaps it is not yet too late.'"

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

The Exorcist (1973)

"'I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids. ...Because as soon as you have a kid, you know for sure that you're going to die.'"

Christine, Stephen King

Fearless (1993)

Fearless (1993)

"The sun had risen, the sky was clear. I crouched among the rocks, perched like a seagull on a ledge, and contemplated the sea. My body felt powerful, fresh and obedient. And my mind, following the waves, became itself a wave, unresisting, submissive to the rhythm of the sea. 

Then my heart began to swell. Obscure, pleading and imperious voices rose within me. I knew who was calling to me. Whenever I was alone for a moment, this being cried out, in an anguish of horrible presentiments, transports and mad fears--waiting to be delivered by me. 

I hurriedly opened Dante, my traveling companion, in order not to hear and to exorcise the fearful demon. I turned over the pages, reading a line here and there, or ..."

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

still got it

"To my mind, this Cretan countryside resembled good prose, carefully ordered, sober, free from superfluous ornament, powerful and restrained. It expressed all that was necessary with the greatest economy. It had no flippancy, no artifice about it. It said what it had to say with a manly austerity. But between the severe lines one could discern an unexpected sensitiveness and tenderness; in the sheltered hollows the lemon and orange trees perfumed the air, and from the vastness of the sea emanated an inexhaustible poetry."

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

parfait mélange

"and the palms of my hands became redolent with savory, sage and mint."

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

Babies (2010)

"I'm doing what I know how to do, and as well as I know how to do it."

On Writing, Stephen King

Surface Tension (1968)

"It was raining and I could see the shafts of rain link sky and mud. ...The rain and my spleen took on, in the humid atmosphere, the features of my great friend. Was it last year? In another life? Yesterday?... 

... The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh. Its perceptions are still coarse and brutish. It can divine nothing clearly, nothing with certainty."

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

"... I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I'll ever be able to use this experience in a book. With one long pinkie nail, I dislodge another piece of herring from between my teeth and flick it dramatically into the North Sea."

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

"'Dancing is like fucking,' I said, 'it doesn't matter how you look--just concentrate on how you feel.' Wasn't I the brazen one? What was this woman-of-the-world act anyway? I was half-crazed with fear."

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

("Six years of writing and discarding, writing and changing, trying to get deeper and deeper into myself.")

"Really, I thought, sometimes I would like to have a child. A very wise and witty little girl who'd grow up to be the woman I could never be. A very independent little girl with no scars on the brain or the psyche. With no toadying servility and no ingratiating seductiveness. A little girl who said what she meant and meant what she said. A little girl who was neither bitchy nor mealymouthed because she didn't hate her mother or herself. 

'Isadora!' 

What I really wanted was to give birth to myself--the little girl I might have been in a different family, a different world. I hugged my knees. I felt strangely safe there, under my mother's fur coat. 

'Isadora!'..."

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

"I congratulate myself on every successful takeoff, but not too enthusiastically because it's also part of my personal religion that the minute you grow overconfident and really relax about the flight, the plane crashes instantly. Constant vigilance, that's my motto. A mood of cautious optimism should prevail. But actually my mood is better described as cautious pessimism."

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

Dances With Wolves (1990)

Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990)

achievement of mastery

Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990)
"--he has been buried in the earth for two-thousand years; he was found in a tomb."

Psycho III (1986)

The open window
(propped by weathered wood swelling
against stiles and jambs)

pipes low-sodic light
across my lightless bedroom
and motions mute chimes

onto the surface
of a burnt-out fireplace
(like a woody pit).

The Paper Chase (1973)

"I breathed. I began to wake up. I stretched and yawned in the soul I had forgotten, and the waking took months and years. I awoke a little more each spring and found rest for my weariness each enfolding winter. I shed more of my multicolored armor each fall. I was lucid in the warm of summer. I opened my eyes. I opened. I started noticing things. I noticed how alike the gorillas and I were. Sometimes I was filled with joy, and I wanted to shout, 'There are other real and gentle people among us! Human people are not alone! Look! Look!' Instead I stayed silent and I wrote about the gorillas--reams and reams--but ripped it all up and threw it away because it as all too private and I couldn't bear the thought of anyone seeing it."

Songs of the Gorilla Nation, Dawn Prince-Hughes

"The word would seem different somehow, taking on new properties, as I passed my cherished landmarks. 'Hippopotamus!' I would say as I passed the first leg of my journey, my grandparents' bedroom, where the word would absorb the comfort of my grandparents' bed, their clothing, the beauty of my grandmother's vanity table, and the smell of cedar drawers; then on to the bathroom yelling 'Hippopotamus!' where the word would absorb the smell of antiseptic, toilet bowl cleaner, baby powder, perfume, and toothpaste; through the second bedroom, where the word would absorb the light from the fixture on the ceiling, with its fascinating mobile. 'Hippopotamus, Hippopotamus!' I would repeat; I would veer around the corner where the front door stood across from the stairs going to the second floor, where the word would assimilate the power of the dark stairwell; I hurried on through the living room, where the television was always on, and the word would be injected with whatever scene was on the screen."

Songs of the Gorilla Nation, Dawn Prince-Hughes

para los devorados

"'I don't know how many times you have to be burned in order to learn something. The same mistakes, over and over.' 

'I couldn't agree with you more,' said Wilhelm with a face of despair. 'You're right, Father. It's the same mistakes, and I get burned again and again. I can't seem to--I'm stupid, Dad, I just can't breathe. My chest is all up--I feel choked. I just simply can't catch my breath.' ... 

... 'I don't want to listen to the details,' said his father. 'And I want you to understand that I'm too old to take on new burdens. I'm just too old to do it. And people who will just wait for help--must wait for help. They have got to stop waiting.'"

Seize the Day, Saul Bellows

"And was everybody crazy here? What sort of people did you see? Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own idea and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then the war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. 'I'm fainting, please get me a little water.' You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood..."

Seize the Day, Saul Bellow

I've been waiting (I've been wrong)

The Philadelphia Experiment (1984)

"'... There's money everywhere. Everyone is shoveling it in. Money is--is--'"

Seize the Day, Saul Bellow

Little Man Tate (1991)

"'I think you're getting through to me, Don.' 

He looked at me and smiled. 'The time I get through to you is the time to leave you alone for a while.'"

Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, Richard Bach 

"And still the lean hound baying at the door; / And one of my exiled countrymen with me there, / To the common laughter spoke the strange desire: / 'What are we doing in this God-forsaken hole; Why don't we go back there where we belong?'"

"As a Stream Flows Home," This Low Delta, The Journey Down, Delta Return, Charles G. Bell

It's Pat (1994)

"The light came from the window of a pawnshop. The shop was closed, but a glaring bulb hung there to discourage looters who might be reduced to this. He stopped and looked at it. He thought, the most indecent sight on earth, a pawnshop window. The things which had been sacred to men, and the things which had been precious surrendered to the sight of all, to the pawing and the bargaining, trash to the indifferent eyes of strangers, the equality of a junk heap, typewriters and violins--the tools of dreams, old photographs and wedding rings--the tags of love, together with soiled trousers, coffee pots, ash trays, pornographic plaster figures; the refuse of despair, pledged, not sold, not cut off in clean finality, but locked to a stillborn hope, never to be redeemed. 'Hello, Gail Wynand,' he said to the things in the window, and walked on."

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

"And finally sink beneath that watery floor--"

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

"It's only a bottle cap, thought Wynand looking down at a speck of glitter under his feet; a bottle cap ground into the pavement. The pavements of New York are full of things like that--bottle caps, safety pins, campaign buttons, sink chains; sometimes--lost jewels; it's all alike now, flattened, ground in; it makes the pavements sparkle at night. The fertilizer of a city. Someone drank the bottle empty and threw the cap away. How many cars have passed over it? Could one retrieve it now? Could one kneel and dig with bare hands and tear it out again? I had no right to hope for escape. I had no right to kneel and seek redemption. Millions of years ago, when the earth was being born, there were living things like me: flies caught in resin that became amber, animals caught in ooze that became rock. I am a man of the twentieth century and I became a bit of tine in the pavements, for the trucks of New York to roll over."

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
Seize the Day, Saul Bellow

('You're in a shame spiral, buddy!')

(2017)

"'The thing that is destroying the world. The thing you were talking about. Actual selflessness.' 

'The ideal which they say does not exist?' 

'They're wrong. It does exist--though not in the way they imagine. It's what I couldn't understand about people for a long time. They have no self. They live within others. They live second-hand. Look at Peter Keating. ... 

... 'That, precisely is the deadliness of second-handers. They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They're concerned only with people. They don't ask: "Is this true?" They ask: "Is this what others think is true?" Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. You don't think through another's brain and you don't work through another's hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgement, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-Handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation--anchored to nothing. That's the emptiness I couldn't understand in people. ...'"

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

(2017)

"'Howard, I'm a parasite. I've been a parasite all my life. You designed my best projects at Stanton. You designed the first house I ever built. You designed the Cosmo Slotnick Building. I have fed on you and on all the men like you who lived before we were born. The men who designed the Parthenon, the Gothic cathedrals, the first skyscrapers. If they hadn't existed, I wouldn't have known how to put stone on stone. In the whole of my life, I haven't added a new doorknob to what men have done before me. I have taken that which was not mine and given nothing in return. I had nothing to give. This is not an act, Howard, and I'm very conscious of what I'm saying. And I came here to ask you to save me again. If you wish to throw me out, do it now.'"

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

"One evening, she said without preamble: 'Petey, I think you should get married. I think it would be much better if you were married.' He found no answer, and while he groped for something gay to utter, she added: 'Petey, why don't you... why don't you marry Catherine Halsey?' He felt anger filling his eyes, he felt pressure on his swollen lids, while he was turning slowly to his mother; then he saw her squat little figure before him, stiff and defenseless, with a kind of desperate pride, offering to take any blow he wished to deliver, absolving him in advance--and he knew that it had been the bravest gesture she had ever attempted. The anger went, because he felt her pain more sharply than the shock of his own, and he lifted one hand, to let it fall limply, to let the gesture cover everything, saying only: 'Mother, don't let's...'"

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

"He's gone into a game loop, he's locked up, and he won't come out of it until you give him a proper game line of dialogue."

Allegra Gellar, eXistenZ (1999)

 La Lune dans le Caniveau (1983)