Mark "Rent-boy" Renton: We took morphine, diamorphine, cyclizine, codeine, temazepam, nitrazepam, phenobarbitone, sodium amytal, dextropropoxyphene, methadone, nalbuphine, pethidine, pentazocine, buprenorphine, dextromoramide, chlormethiazole. The st...
English Bob: This Strawberry Alice person, tell me again. Barber: Down the street and across. Greely's Beer Garden and Billiard Parlour. Just ask for Alice; say you want a game of billiards. English Bob: Even though I don't really wish to play. Barbe...
Russell: Good afternoon. Are you in need of any assistance today, sir? Carl Fredricksen: No. Russell: I could help you cross the street. Carl Fredricksen: No. Russell: I could help you cross your yard. Carl Fredricksen: No. Russell: I could help you ...
[from trailer] Jordan Belfort: My name is Jordan Belfort. I'm a former member of the middle class raised by two accountants in a tiny apartment in Bayside, Queens. The year I turned 26, as the head of my own brokerage firm, I made $49 million, which ...
Jordan Belfort: [in thoughts] What I'm asking, you Swiss dick, is are you going to fuck me over? Jean Jacques Saurel: [also in thoughts] I understand perfectly, you American shit, Jean Jacques Saurel: Ça depend. Jordan Belfort: Ça depend on what ex...
Jordan Belfort: After 15 years in storage, the lemons had developed a delayed fuse. It took 90 minutes for these fuckers to kick in but once they did POW, and I had skipped the tingle phase and jumped straight to the drool phase. These little bastard...
Detective Richie Roberts: This is the newly formed Essex County narcotics squad, our mandate is to make major arrests, no street guys, we're looking for the suppliers and distributors, Heroin, Cocaine, Amphetamines, no grass under a thousand pounds, ...
Taxi Driver: Puts you in mind of the days of the old demon barber of Fleet Street, don't it? Alex: Sorry? Taxi Driver: The murders. David: What murders? Taxi Driver: Haven't you heard? Last night... six of 'em. All in different parts of the city, all...
Walter Chalmers: Lieutenant, don't try to evade the responsibility. In your... parlance, you blew it. You knew the significance of his testimony, yet you failed to take adequate measures to protect him. So to you, it was a job, no more. Were it more,...
My friends, tonight we bring you something entirely different. Something special. The poets will rest, the sonnets will be silent, and what words of love there are will not be spoken. Tonight, my friends, and I can hear you out there, sitting alone, ...
She knows Daddy better than I do. I think it's because she's felt since we were children that our Daddy maybe loved me more than he loves her. This isn't true, and she knows that now--people love different people in different ways--but it must have s...
As I sit here on a snowy morning watching the flakes gently fall outside my window, I look at the 300-year-old building across the street and the beautifully carved angels on its facade. There was a time people would create, just to give something be...
In the dark, neglected gutter running the length of a nearby secluded side street lies a small, lifeless bird. This is the blackcap – the unaccustomed northern nightingale – a creature with a charcoal greyness to its slender feathers. He fell fro...
When this reality, the one and only power that checks and disciplines man from within, vanishes because belief in it is slackening, the social domain falls prey to passions. The ensuing vacuum is filled by the gas of emotion. Everyone proclaims what ...
Isabel, remember we used to talk about a honeymoon in Spain?" "Of course." "It woulda been a blast. I took a walk last night. Two in the morning, it felt like two in the afternoon. Traffic. People on the street: families, old folks on benches. The ba...
We care (about prison education), very simply, because (prisoners) get out. Almost everyone who is locked up now is going to be set free one day. If we treat prisoners like animals the whole time they are locked up, that's what we'll get when they're...
It seemed too as if many of the people were on display, behaving as if they expected to be looked at, as if they were on show: so many of them seemed to be wearing costumes, not just policemen and firemen and waiters and shop assistants, but people i...
Anyway, I think Florence and I noticed each other before the local train screeched to a halt at the 110th Street station, because as I boarded it felt as though we were supposed to step into the same car, and hold onto the same moist metal bar. My wi...
Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people...
I learned as a kid that homo sapiens would rather fight other homo sapiens than microbes. For one thing, it’s easier. And there’s something satisfying about knowing somebody else is the bad guy and seeing them laid out on the street in front of y...
There is a line in Verlaine I shall not recall again, There is a street close by forbidden to my feet, There's a mirror that's seen me for the very last time, There is a door that I have locked till the end of the world. Among the books in my library...
