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