When one contemplated Portia, when one contemplated Sharon, when one contemplated one's own apparently pointless, utterly trivial being, the questions hung all around one, as urgent as knives at the throat. But the instant one tried to grasp one of t...
One of the greatest pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten in my life was from my mom. When I was a little kid there was a kid who was bugging me at school and she said “Okay, I’m gonna tell you what to do. If the kid’s bugging you and puts his ha...
Clarence Anglin: What movie is playing this week? John Anglin: Some cowboy piece of shit. [goes into Italian-American voice] John Anglin: 'ey, least dey could show was a gangsta movie! [laughs] Frank Morris: I may have found a way out of here. [the g...
Roberta: [after showing her weird short film to her art class] That piece is entitled "Mirror, Father, Mirror". I like to show it to people that I'm meeting for the first time because I think it says so much about who I am and what it feels like to i...
Dumbledore: The Goblet of Fire! Anyone wishing to submit themselves to the tournament need only write their name upon a piece of parchment and throw it in the flame before this hour on Thursday night. Do not do so lightly! If chosen, there's no turni...
Diner Fight Guy 1: The fuck is wrong with you, man? You'd rather die for some piece of shit that you don't even fucking know? Dave Lizewski: The three assholes, laying into one guy while everybody else watches? And you wanna know what's wrong with me...
Jack Vincennes: Karen, this is Sid Hudgens of Hush-Hush Magazine. Sid Hudgens: Hellooooo, Karen! Jack's Dancing Partner: Hello yourself! [walks off angrily] Jack Vincennes: What's that about? Sid Hudgens: Eh, we ran a piece last year, "Ingenue Dykes ...
Frank T.J. Mackey: Do you think they're your friends? They're not your friends. Do you really think she'll be there when things go bad? Huh? When things go wrong? You think again. Fucking Denise. Denise the piece. Oh, you're gonna give me that cherry...
Jöns: Love is as contagious as a cold. It eats away at your strength, morale... If everything is imperfect in this world, love is perfect in its imperfection. Blacksmith Plog: You're happy, you with your oily words. You believe your own twaddle. Jö...
Elaine: Would you gentlemen care to order your dinners? First Jive Dude: Bet, babe. Slide a piece o' da' porter. Drinks, I run da' java. Second Jive Dude: Lookie here. I can dig grease 'n chompin' on some buns and draggin' through the garden.
A word that turns up in TNR’s literary pieces is “tasteless. “ They use it in the same way you might reprove a toilet joke at the dinner table or around relatives. But with them it takes on moral weight. It’s a very damaging mistake: the idea...
What is so special about a title? The mode and significance of titles have changed with the change in the lyrical traditions. So these transitions in style and the art of signification are all collective. What has never changed is the author's intent...
I love writing, but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, Giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy: I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dan...
Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire, then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized, anyhow. Chatter...
It's disingenuous to say that criticism doesn't get to you or you don't hear it or that you ignore it. When everybody says, 'That's crap. I hated that,' you hear it. But it's much, much worse when they're right: when you feel that it is an absolute p...
Comeback records always worry me, especially when they're made by one of my heroes, and I'd heard stories about Gil Scott-Heron recently, about drug arrests and prison terms and other troubles. I wasn't prepared for the ravaged shakiness of his voice...
I keep threatening to keep a formal journal, but whenever I start one it instantly becomes an exercise in self-consciousness. Instead of a journal I manage to have dozens of notebooks with bits and pieces of stories, poems, and notes. Almost every th...
We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.
Dan Nilsson even remarks of compound eyes that ‘It is only a small exaggeration to say that evolution seems to be fighting a desperate battle to improve a basically disastrous design.
I tried that too, you know. After ... my family was murdered, and I was waiting for justice, I tried to hide inside a bottle. But some men, Tony, [..] are not small enough to fit into a bottle.
I, while the gods laugh, the world's vortex am; Maelström of passions in that hidden sea Whose waves of all-time lap the coasts of me; And in small compass the dark waters cram. -
