1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
5988
5989
5990
5991
5992
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2adc1f8 | To Evelyn our relationship is yellow and blue, but to me it's a gray place, most of it blacked out, bombed, footage from the film in my head is endless shots of stone and any language heard is utterly foreign, the sound flickering away over new images: blood pouring from automated tellers, women giving birth through their assholes, embryos frozen or scrambled (which is it?), nuclear warheads, billions of dollars, the total destruction of th.. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| cef1052 | I feel naked, suddenly tiny. My mouth tastes metallic, then it gets worse. My vision: a winter road. But I'm left with one comforting thought: I am rich--millions are not. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| b025975 | I'm having a sort of hard time paying attention because my automated teller has started speaking to me, sometimes actually leaving weird messages on the screen, in green lettering, like "Cause a Terrible Scene at Sotheby's" or "Kill the President" or "Feed Me a Stray Cat," and I was freaked out by the park bench that followed me for six blocks last Monday evening and it too spoke to me. Disintegration--I'm taking it in stride." | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 72a1e6e | Courtney, McDermott and I have just left a Morgan Stanley party that took place near the Seaport at the tip of Manhattan in a new club called Goldcard, which seemed like a vast city of its own and where I ran into Walter Rhodes, a total Canadian, whom I haven't seen since Exeter and who also, like McDermott, reeked of Xeryus, and I actually told him, "Listen, I'm trying to stay away from people. I'm avoiding even speaking to them," and then.. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 78116d6 | This was what i could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person's love or kindness. Nothing .. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 8c28abd | What is it?" I ask, opening the folded page. "It's an article on your hero, Donald Trump." McDermott grins." | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 15df1b5 | Listen," I say, my voice trembling with emotion, "have whatever you want but I'm telling you I recommend the Diet Pepsi." | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 8196246 | The client had the boudin blanc, the roasted chicken and the cheesecake," he says. "Cheesecake?" I say, confused by this plain, alien-sounding list. "What sauce or fruits were on the roasted chicken? What shapes was it cut into?" "None, Patrick," he says, also confused. "It was... roasted." "And the cheesecake, what flavor? Was it heated?" I say. "Ricotta cheesecake? Goat cheese? Were there flowers or cilantro in it?" "It was just... regula.. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| e2a871f | You don't think it's"- and now she looks around the restaurant before leaning in, whispering-"AIDS?" "Oh no, nothing like that," I say, though immediately I wish I had paused long enough before answering to scare her. "Just . . . general . . . brain"--I bite the tip off an herbed breadstick and shrug--"injuries." | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 30cd7ec | I would demand to wear Ray-Ban sunglasses. Expensive Ray-Bans," I say carefully. "In fact I would demand that everyone would have to wear Ray-Ban sunglasses." | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| f6b87de | Armstrong just got back from the islands and has a very deep, very even tan, but so do I. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| d436016 | On The Patty Winters Show this morning a Cheerio sat in a very small chair and was interviewed for close to an hour. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 9941be6 | You just said your name was Pat." "No. I was wrong," I say sternly, staring directly at him. "I was wrong about my name being Pat. My name is Marcus." | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 8bd844d | En cuanto me di cuenta de que estaba completamente solo comprendi, solo entonces, que tenia problemas graves. Mi actitud nostalgica con respecto a la fama y las drogas -el placer de comadecerme a mi mismo- se habia transformado en tristeza y el futuro ya no me parecia ni remotamente plausible. Solamente una cosa parecia correr hacia mi: una negrura, una tumba, el final | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 75d3aea | Cualquiera que fuera el interes que compartian se evaporo tan rapido que parecio no haber existido en absoluto. Robby se nos acerco penosamente bajo el destello de las luces del centro comercial y de pronto me preocupo que su vida tuviera tan poco de poesia o romanticismo. Todo giraba en torno a una cotidianidad ansiosa y aburrida. Todo era una representacion | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 7585dcb | Skinny like a model with her eyes all painted black, keeps going to the bathroom always says she'll be right back | Caroline Weiss | ||
| 10d7753 | The topic on The Patty Winters Show this morning was Has Patrick Swayze Become Cynical or Not? | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 356b9af | get into Zeus Bar. Kaktus. Kaktus at nine." "But" | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| b713540 | The worst of all reasons for continuing anything is that it is easily continuable. | Alice Meynell | ||
| 2c4134b | London visibly works at nothing but transformation. | Alice Meynell | ||
| 6645e57 | Worse than spanking or even liver was the sound of someone else's Ping-Pong. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 5c991a1 | Pip's mother's lane was spongy with redwood needles dislodged and sodden with the rain, the sound of which surrounded her polyrhythmically, a steady background patter, heavier drippings, hiccuping gurgles. The musty wood-soak smell of Valley wetness overwhelmed her with sense-memory. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| c11aa02 | Leila would have been well advised, before marrying a novelist or imagining herself as one, to wait and sample life in a house where a big book was being contemplated. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 7ded926 | To her the strangest thought of all was that she might be extraordinarily appealing. It went against everything she believed in, or at least against everything she wanted to believe in; because, deep down, in her most honest heart, maybe every person considered herself extraordinarily appealing. Maybe this was just a human thing. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| df9f12b | And yet there's other species even closer to zero. I know that. And I hope to God somebody else is worrying about 'em. I often ask myself, would I slit my own throat if I was guaranteed I could save one species by slitting it? We all know one human life is worth more than one bird's life. But is my miserable little life worth a whole species? | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 6949aa6 | And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight-isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've ever experienced before? You see things more clearly and you KNOW that you're seeing them more cl.. | grief growth | Jonathan Franzen | |
| c95edc1 | Charles was at the apex of his career, coming off a Lannan Fellowship year and a front-page Times review that had anointed him as the heir of John Barth and Stanley Elkin, but he didn't know it was the apex. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| eafb676 | The cabin was dark. Inside it was the sound of her childhood, the patter of rain on a roof that consisted only of shingle and bare boards, no insulation or ceiling. She associated the sound with her mother's love, which had been as reliable as the rain in its season. Waking up in the night and hearing the rain still pattering the same way it had when she'd fallen asleep, hearing it night after night, had felt so much like being loved that t.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 0419cf7 | It seems important to cling to the concrete, to remember that illness is not a metaphor or a study but a phenomenon unfolding in (and on) real bodies in real rooms. Its qualia, the crinkly paper hospital gown and metallic adrenaline taste, the mutable and inexpressible shades of pain, demand articulation because they matter. We work so hard at telling others what it is like to be sick in whichever particular way we are sick; we are reassure.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| df68373 | Gary wished that all further migration to the coasts could be banned and all midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity-- | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 6b601f7 | with nothing left to relish or discover, he just might die of boredom. Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| ba21cf9 | I]t is doubtful whether we may name any weak thing as typically spiritual. | Alice Meynell | ||
| fea4d81 | Ima toliko Dzonatana. Prava poplava knjzevnih Dzonatana. Kad bi citala Njujork tajms buk rivju, pomislila bi da je to najcesce musko ime u Americi. Sinonim za velicinu i talenat. Za ambiciju i vitalnost." Podigao je obrvu i pogledao Pip. ,,A Zejdi Smit? Sjajno stivo, zar ne?" -- | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 3c42826 | Like the old politburos, the new politburo styled itself as the enemy of the elite and the friend of the masses, dedicated to giving consumers what they wanted, but to Andreas (who, admittedly, had never learned how to want stuff) it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 74350e5 | Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| f6199c4 | Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I'm never sure which term is appropriate." "Call it all three if you want," Andreas said. "Chutzpah. That's a fourth term." | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 615afff | A cascade of reactions initiated by Factor 6 relaxed his tear valves and sent a wave of nausea down his vagus: a "sense" that he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. That heaping your tomb with treasure wouldn't save you." -- | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| f2f1761 | Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz's Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the ti.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 3de8021 | His inner life now consisted of little but obsessing about his image on an Internet that felt like death to him; of | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 503e49c | Esa no era la persona que el creia ser, o la que habria elegido ser si hubiera tenido la libertad de elegir, pero habia algo reconfortante y liberador en ser una persona real y definida, y no una coleccion de personas potenciales y contradictorias. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 029f019 | him under house arrest was in his head. Hearing | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 3da5218 | I segreti erano potere. I soldi erano potere. Essere necessari a qualcuno era potere. Potere, potere, potere: com'era possibile che il mondo girasse intorno alla lotta per una cosa che creava solitudine e angoscia in chi la possedeva? | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 9533758 | The country that minutely followed every phony turn of American Idol while the world went up in flames seemed to Walter fully deserving of whatever nightmare future awaited it. He | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| aa93901 | the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as 'diseased.' A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental 'health' is the ability to p.. | Jonathan Franzen |