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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5a9089a | I think that one of these days," he said, "you're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there." | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 23d0fbe | What's the matter with you, buddy? Where are your brains? If you've had a freakish education, at least use it, use it. You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you'll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| c581c54 | But we can't ignore our social needs either. We have to stop people from abusing the welfare system. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women but change the abortion laws to protect the right to life yet still somehow maintain women's freedom of choice. We also have to control the influx of illegal immigrants. We have to encoura.. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 6725f95 | Mi dolor es constante e intenso y no espero que haya un mundo mejor para nadie. De hecho quiero que mi dolor le sea inflingido a otros. | odio rencor | Bret Easton Ellis | |
| b0ddce2 | Careless and not particularly biting, it was easier to shrug off than anything in the first book which depicted me as an inarticulate zombie confused by the irony of Randy Newman's "I Love L.A." | writing | Bret Easton Ellis | |
| e5d6c03 | While walking back to the highway I stop, choke back a sob, my throat tightens. "I just want to..." Facing the skyline, through all the baby talk, I murmur, "keep the game going." As I stand, frozen in position, an old woman emerges behind a Threepenny Opera poster at a deserted bus stop and she's homeless and begging, hobbling over, her face covered with sores that look like bugs, holding out a shaking red hand. "Oh will you please go away.. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 2f76312 | Questions raced through my mind--does she go wild during sex, does she come easily, does she freak out about oral sex, does she mind a guy coming in her mouth? Then I realized I won't go to bed with a girl if she won't do that. I also won't go to bed with a girl if she can't or won't have an orgasm because then, what's the point? If you can't make a girl come why even bother? That always seemed to me to be like writing questions in a letter.. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 66e8fdc | So many people died last year: the accidental overdose, the car wreck in East Hampton, the surprise illness. People just disappeared. I fall asleep to the music coming from the Abbey, a song from the past, "Hungry Like the Wolf," rising faintly above the leaping chatter of the club, transporting me for one long moment into someone both young and old. Sadness: it's everywhere." | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| ee82021 | I realize I have nothing to say to Trent Burroughs as I tell him, "I've been in New York the last four months." New Age Christmas music fails to warm up the chilly vibe. I'm suddenly unsure about everything." | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| d1cf2f0 | she is searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there ... is ... no ... key. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 4fd2c67 | Akthent on thee latht thyllable. | satire | Bret Easton Ellis | |
| 115daff | There's a moment of sheer panic when I discover Paul's apartment overlooks the park | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| cf2f97a | I'm tired, William. I'm tired of you. I'm tired of these parties. I'm tired." "The tone of your voice could have fooled me," he says, taking my arm roughly. "Just smile, okay? Just until we get past the photographers, then I don't give a fuck what you do." "You ... are ... awful," I say. "You're not much better," he says, pulling me along." -- | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 92ccdae | Even the successful 1985 Bret Easton Ellis book (and 1987 film) Less Than Zero, which tracks the falling from grace of wealthy Los Angeles teens, could not be imagined with the logically equivalent title: Negative. | Neil deGrasse Tyson | ||
| bc49310 | It's as if her mind is having a hard time communicating with her mouth, as if she is searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there ... is ... no ... key. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 6e0e3b6 | When I flush the toilet in my bathroom, it becomes stopped up with Kleenex, and blood clouds the water and I put down the lid, because there's nothing else for me to do. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 8d5ece0 | The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track. | fiction reality writing | Bret Easton Ellis | |
| ed67235 | There are some guys sitting at tables who all look at this one gorgeous girl, longingly, hoping for at least one dance or a blow job in Daddy's car and there are all these girls, looking indifferent or bored, smoking clove cigarettes, all of them or at least most of them staring at one blond-haired boy standing in the back with sunglasses on. Julian | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 2d2210e | The audience-- the book's actual cast-- quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at .. | writing | Bret Easton Ellis | |
| bd8bbd6 | Cafe Flore is packed, shimmering, every table filled. Bentley notices this with a grim satisfaction but Bentley feels lost. He's still haunted by the movie Grease and obsessed with legs that he always felt were too skinny though no one else did and it never hampered his modeling career and he's still not over a boy he met at a Styx concert in 1979 in a stadium somewhere in the Midwest, outside a town he has not been back to since he left it.. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 891d427 | But most of us now lead lives on social media that are more performance based than we ever could have imagined even a decade ago, and thanks to this burgeoning cult of likability, in a sense, we've all become actors. We've had to rethink the means with which to express our feelings and thoughts and ideas and opinions in the void created by a corporate culture that is forever trying to silence us by sucking up everything human and contradict.. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 5850b6b | It's basically a joke." "I think it's cool," Julian says. "It's all about control, right?" He considers something. "It's not a joke. You should take it seriously. I mean, you're also one of the producers--" I cut him off. "Why have you been tracking this?" "It's a big deal and--" "Julian, it's a movie," I say. "Why have you been tracking this? It's just another movie." "Maybe for you." "What does that mean?" "Maybe for others it's so.. | pop-culture work | Bret Easton Ellis | |
| ec2bb7f | She said that you--" "I don't care what she said." I stand up. "Everyone lies." "Hey," he says softly. "It's just a code." "No. Everyone lies." I stub the cigarette out. "It's just another language you have to learn." Then he delicately adds, "I think you need some coffee, dude." Pause. "Why are you so angry?" | socializing trust truth | Bret Easton Ellis | |
| d9a9dd1 | So many Jonathans. A plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you'd think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| bfc8f5b | My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 17a85a0 | Eager, perhaps, to repay the favor of listening, Sylvia nodded with encouragement. But suddenly she reminded Enid of Katharine Hepburn. In Hepburn's eyes there had been a blank unconsciousness of privilege that made a once-poor woman like Enid want to kick her patrician shins with the hardest-toed pumps at her disposal. It would be a mistake, she felt, to confess anything to this woman. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 8b5f6e1 | Over the balustrade I could see the dark trees of Webster Groves and the more distant TV-tower lights that marked the boundaries of my childhood. A night wind coming across the football practice field carried the smell of thawed winter earth, the great sorrowful world-smell of being alive beneath a sky. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| ddf27af | Snobs by Julian Fellowes The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee People Like Us by Dominick Dunne The Power of Style by Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins (this is out of print; I will lend you my copy) Pride and Avarice by Nicholas Coleridge The Soong Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave Freedom by Jonathan Franzen D. V. by Diana Vreeland A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur by Gayatri Devi Jane Austen--complete works beginning w.. | Kevin Kwan | ||
| f8414d8 | Her very difficulty created friction, and friction led to satisfaction... | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| de38a8f | When I see an actress or actor drag deeply in a movie, I imagine the pyrenes and phenols ravaging the tender epithelial cells and hardworking cilia of their bronchi, the monoxide and cyanide binding to their hemoglobin, the heaving and straining of their chemically panicked hearts. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 1ca29ac | Zachary's mother, Lucy, waylaid him on the third-floor landing and offered, unsolicited, her opinion that the Traumatics had been the kind of adolescently posturing, angst-mongering boy group that never interested her. Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence --the drama of being her-- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation. K.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 33d8a06 | V p'rvite shumove na zapochvane na rabota sutrin se krie opasna t'ga, siakash tishinata ia boli, zadeto e bila obezpokoena. P'rviiat mig ot rabotniia den napomnia za vsichki ostanali migove, ot koito se s'stoi deniat, a nak'svaneto na vremeto na zaltsi ne nosi nishcho dobro. Chak sled kato k'm goliia, samoten p'rvi mig se pris'ediniat i drugi, deniat se ustanoviava po-tsialostno kato den. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 3e99a62 | The tone of the new ones, in their TED Talks, in PowerPointed product launches, in testimony to parliaments and congresses, in utopianly titled books, was a smarmy syrup of convenient conviction and personal surrender that he remembered well from the Republic. He | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 3119740 | When the sex is persuasively rendered, it tends to read autobiographically, and there are limits to my desire for immersion in a stranger's biochemistry. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 5e64706 | The lump in his throat was evidence of how much, in spite of everything, he still loved her. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| b4f5622 | As if sustained and too-direct contact with time's raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 2ef09a6 | She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 4a424f2 | Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 95fde04 | She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn't run away. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| b1b7714 | He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the photographs as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed a modicum of cooperation from the world of objects. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| a15689b | He didn't understand what happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached, and worn out along the fold lines. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 9965f2d | The following afternoon, alone in their room, and oppressed by not yet having made the promised call to Connie... | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| a6faa65 | Birds were what became of dinosaurs. Those mountains of flesh whose petrified bones were on display at the Museum of Natural History had done some brilliant retooling over the ages and could now be found living in the form of orioles in the sycamores across the street. As solutions to the problem of earthly existence, the dinosaurs had been pretty great, but blue-headed vireos and yellow warblers and white-throated sparrows - feather-light,.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| e14e5dc | Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history. | Jonathan Franzen |