Eddie Morra: [at a party] ... Well sure, you'd get a short-term spike, but wouldn't that rapid expansion devalue the stock completely in two years? Kevin Doyle: No, 'cause there are safeguards! Eddie Morra: Against aggressive overexpansion? There are...
Christian Szell: The gun had blanks, the knife, a retractable blade. Hardly original, but effective enough. I think you'll agree. I'm told you are a graduate student. Brilliant, yes? You are an historian, and I am part of history. I should have thoug...
Sam Loomis: You never did eat your lunch, did you? Marion Crane: I better get back to the office. These extended lunch hours give my boss excess acid. Sam Loomis: Why don't you call your boss and tell him you're taking the rest of the afternoon off? ...
Penny Escher: [sitting on bench under an umbrella] May I ask what we're doing out here? Kay Eiffel: [sitting next to Penny without an umbrella] We're imagining car wrecks. Penny Escher: I see. And we can't imagine car wrecks inside? Kay Eiffel: No. D...
Dr. John Watson: You've been in this room for two weeks, I insist you have to get out. Sherlock Holmes: There is absolutely nothing of interest to me, out there, on Earth, at all. Dr. John Watson: So you're free this evening? Sherlock Holmes: Absolut...
Katerina Cavalieri: I heard you met Herr Mozart. Antonio Salieri: News travels fast in Vienna. Katerina Cavalieri: And he's been commissioned to write an opera. Is it true? Antonio Salieri: Yes. Katerina Cavalieri: Is there a part in it for me? Anton...
That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nou...
About eight days ago I discovered that sulfur in burning, far from losing weight, on the contrary, gains it; it is the same with phosphorus; this increase of weight arises from a prodigious quantity of air that is fixed during combustion and combines...
Leadership, Alpha, comes at a cost. You see, we expect that when danger threatens us from the outside, that the person who is actually stronger, the person who is better fed, and the person who is teaming with serotonin and actually has higher confid...
I carry my liberty with me. It is in my thoughts, in my head. Shakespeare is one of my countries, Goethe another. You can change that badge that I wear, but you can’t change the way I think. It is through my intellect that I can escape the roles, i...
But I am scared. Everybody's scared." "You know what I mean, like scared scared. Like coward scared, like if you never went to begin with. But with everything you've done nobody's going to doubt you." Then she made a somewhat frantic speech about a w...
Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language in public = playing with yourself), and with ...
Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of of mortal inventions. "No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from." "But what if he is your friend?" Achilles has asked him, feet kicked up on the wall of the rose-quartz cave. "O...
Zakath stared at the floor. 'I suddenly feel very helpless,' he admitted, 'and I don't like the feeling. I've been rather effectively dethroned, you know. This morning I was the Emperor of the largest nation on earth; this afternoon, I'm going to be ...
Page 15, paperback version by Virago Press 1997: ... Let me ask you this, Mr Ai: do you know, by your own experience, what patriotism is?” ‘No’, I said, shaken by the force of the intese personality suddenly turning itself wholly upon me. ‘I ...
See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it...
Pak Suleh recalled the atmosphere on his island of Pulau Sebidang, which had been ruled by his ancestors for more than a hundred years. Now it had been passed to foreign hands—whichever nation from whatever foreign world which had been claiming the...
I thought of Sammy Glick rocking in his cradle of hate, malnutrition, prejudice, suspicions, amorality, the anarchy of the poor; I thought of him as a mangy puppy in a dog-eat-dog world. I was modulating my hate for Sammy Glick from the personal to t...
Raoul Duke: Well, they've nailed me goddamnit. I'm trapped in some stinking desert crossroads called Baker. I don't have much time man, the fuckers are closing in! They'll hunt me down like a fucking beast! Dr. Gonzo: Whoa, getting a little paranoid?...
D.J. #1: Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there today. D.J. #2: It's coooold out there every day. What is this, Miami Beach? D.J. #1: Not hardly. And you know, you can expect hazardous travel later...
Tshepo reckons that it is inevitable that one’s circle of friends will become smaller as one grows older. He reasons that when we begin we are similar, like two glasses of water sitting side by side on a clean tray. There is very little that differ...
