"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