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)

"'... My real soul, Peter? It's real only when it's independent--you've discovered that, haven't you? It's real only when it chooses curtains and desserts--you're right about that--curtains, desserts and religions, Peter, and the shapes of buildings. But you've never wanted that. You wanted a mirror. People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they're reflecting too. You know, like the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage. Usually in the more vulgar kind of hotels. Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose. I gave you what you want. I became what you are, what your friends are, what most of humanity is so busy being--only without the trimmings. I didn't go around sprouting book reviews to hide my emptiness of judgment--I said I had no judgement. I didn't borrow designs to hide my creative impotence--I created nothing. I didn't say that equality is a noble conception and unity the chief goal of mankind--I just agreed with everybody. You call it death, Peter? That kind of death--I've imposed it on you an on everyone around us. But you--they enjoy your presence. You've spared them the blank death. Because you've imposed it--on yourself.'"

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

"He stared into the fire. That was what made a man happy--to sit looking dreamily into a fire, at his own hearth, in his own home; that's what he had always heard and read. He stared at the flames, unblinking, to force himself into complete obedience to an established truth. Just one more minute of it and I will feel happy, he thought, concentrating. Nothing happened."

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

"'In the past, all poets knew their poems. If you couldn't say a poem by heart, it meant it hadn't entered your heart.'"

"An Interview Based on Conversations with Don Bredes and David Brooks (Sheffield, Vermont, December 1975), Walking Down the Stairs, Selections from Interviews, Galway Kinnell

"'Like it?' Roark asked. 

'Don't use stupid words.'"

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

"'You're a God-damn fool. Yo have no right to care what I think of your work, what I am or why I'm here. You're too good for that. But if you want to know it--I think you're the best sculptor we've got. I think it, because your figures are not what men are but what men could be--and should be. Because you've gone beyond the probably and made us see what is possible, but possible only through you. Because your figures are more devoid of contempt for humanity than any work I've ever seen. Because you have a magnificent respect for the human being. Because your figures are the heroic in man. And so I didn't come here to do you a favor or because I felt sorry for you or because you need a job pretty badly. I came for a simple, selfish reason--the same reason that makes a man choose the cleanest food he can find. It's a law of survival, isn't it?--the seek the best. I didn't come for your sake. I came for mine.'"

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

"The house drifted past. He yawned and winked. 'Taught me to love, bless her sweet ass.' 

Then--as he was talking--a set of tail-lights going past lit up McMurphy's face, and the windshield reflected and expression that was allowed only because he figured it'd be too dark for anybody in the car to see, dreadfully tired and strained and frantic, like there wasn't enough time left for something he had to do. ... 

While his relaxed, good-natured voice doled out his life for us to live, a rollicking past full of kid fun and drinking buddies and loving women and barroom battles over meager honors--for all of us to dream ourselves into."

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey

There Will Be Blood (2007)

"I thought as a boy that was the most beautiful house I'd ever seen, and I wanted it. I wanted to live in it, and eat in it, and clean it. And even as a boy, I wanted to have children to run around in it. ... I think if I saw that house now, it'd make me sick."

"'... Maybe it came too late. I don't know. Young people think that you forge what happens on the way when you get there. But you don't. Something stays. I'll always remember how I was a boy--in a little place down in Georgia, that was--and how I ran errands for the harness maker, and the kids laughed when carriages drove by and splashed mud all over my pants. That's how long ago I decided that some day I'd have a house of my own, the kind of a house that carriages stop before. After that, no matter how hard it got to be at times, I'd always think of that house, and it helped. Afterward, there were years when I was afraid of it--I could have built it, but I was afraid. Well, now the time has come. Do you understand, Mr. Roark? Austen said you'd be just the man who'd understand. ' 

'Yes,' said Roark eagerly, 'I do.' ... 

... When Roark began to speak Mr. Mundy listened, in polite astonishment. He did not seem to resent the words. They did not penetrate. 

'Don't you see?' Roark was saying. 'It's a monument you want to build, but not to yourself. Not to your life or your achievement. To other people. To their supremacy over you. You're not challenging that supremacy. You're immortalizing it. You haven't thrown it off--you're putting it up forever. Will you be happy if you seal yourself for the rest of your life in that borrowed shape? Or if you strike free, for once, and build a new house, your own? You don't want the Randolph place. You want what it stood for. But what it stood for is what you've fought all your life.' 

Mr. Mundy listened blankly. And Roark felt again ia bewildered helplessness before unreality: there was no such person as Mr. Mundy; there were only the remnants, long dead, of the people who had inhabited the Randolph place; one could not plead with remnants or convince them."

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

"He tried to explain and to convince. He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton."

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

"That's old Pete, face like a searchlight. He's fifty yards off to my left, but I can see him plain as though there wasn't any fog at all. Or maybe he's up right close and real small, I can't be sure. He tells me once about how tired he is, and just his saying it makes me see his whole life on the railroad, see him working to figure out how to read a watch, breaking a sweat while he tries to get the right button in the right hole of his railroad overalls, doing his absolute damnedest to keep up with a job that comes so easy to the others they can sit back in a chair padded with cardboard and read mystery stories and girlie books. Not that he ever really figured to keep up--he knew from the start he couldn't do that--but he had to try to keep up, just to keep them in sight. So for forty years he was able to live, if not right in the world of men, at least on the edge of it."

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey

Dark Side of the Sun (1988)

"'You know,' said Roark, 'I haven't thought of you at all. I thought of the house.' He added: 'Perhaps that's why I knew how to be considerate of you.'"

"'Well, look at it. Every piece of it is there because the house needs it--and for no other reason. You see it from here as it is inside. The rooms in which you'll live made the shape. The relation of the masses is determined by the distribution of space within. The ornament was determined by the method of construction, an emphasis of the principle that makes it stand. You can see each stress, each support that meets it. Your own eyes go through a structural process when you look at the house, you can follow each step, you see it rise, you know what made it and why it stands. But you've seen buildings with columns that support arches, false windows. You've seen buildings that look as if they contained a single large gall, they have solid columns and single, solid windows six floors high. But you enter and find stories inside. Or buildings that contain a single hall, but with a façade cut up into the floor lines, band courses, tiers of windows. Do you understand the difference? Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience.' 

'Do you know that that's what I've felt in a way? I've felt that when I move into this house, I'll have a new sort of existence, and even my simple daily routine will have a kind of honesty or dignity that I can't quite define. Don't be astonished if I tell you that I feel as if I'll have to live up to that house.' 

'I intended that,' said Roark."

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

"Rourke extended his hand and Mike's grimy fingers closed about it ferociously, as if the smudges he left implanted in Roark's skin said everything he wanted to say. And because he was afraid that he might say it, Mike growled: 

'Run along, boss, run a long. Don't clog up the works like that.'"

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand