In My Father’s Gun Are Many Chambers

All your America is like a dense Balzacian hive in a jewel point.

– Jack Kerouac

The torn Madras handkerchiefs of negresses, and the red gowns of yellow girls, hanging in tatters from their naked bosoms, mixed with the rent dresses of deep-rouged white women, and the split coats, checkered vests, and protruding shirts of pale, or whiskered, or haggard, or mustached fellows of all nations, some of whom seemed scared from their beds, and others seemingly arrested in the midst of some crazy and wanton dance.

– Herman Melville

How like an iron cage was that which they called liberty.

– Nathaniel Hawthorne

Crime is not a crime in country of criminals

I will perish – I cannot become vulgar – nor cater to vulgarity. Therefore, the mob will eat me.

– Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

These days young people don’t seem to experience pleasure unless they’re committing an anti-social act.

– Stephen Greenleaf

Sixty days ago she was such a lovely child and now here she is with a gun in her hand.

– Randolph Apperson Heart

It wasn’t drugs that drove me crazy, it was people.

– John Hinckley, Jr.

Shower, keep clean, enjoy colors and animals. People if possible.

– Sylvia Plath

To diagnose, through Plath’s poetry, the pathological aspects of our era that make death of the spirit inevitable – for that era and all who believe in its assumptions.

– Joyce Carol Oates.

Poor quality is the natural and necessary result of sound financial management.

– Jerome Doolittle

It made Poole wonder where it would all end, the fathers and the sons, the fast-food joints, and if there was a way to disconnect both the gene pool and history, to let nature take over again.

He could always scratch out a living. That wasn’t the problem with modern life, modern America. The problem was something else.

– Gaylord Dold

What he seemed to have in mind was a sort of bicycle socialism, as if here, too, there should be a limit, and the bicycle would be a good place to stop. He spoke of our automobile-TV culture as of something distastefully gross and heavy; Vietnamese ethics are permeated with ideas of lightness and swift pliability: bamboo, bicycles, sandals, straw. As though society’s burden of goods should be no heavier than what a man can carry on his back. With a full lipped contempt very like the contempt he showed for danger, he rejected the notion of a socialist consumer society.

At the time, the implications of this were not clear to me, I was only conscious of a feeling of happy agreement, remembering the ominous meeting between Mr. Krushchev and Mr. Nixon in the model kitchen, like a domestic spat in the infra-red setting of some future One Hell.

The samples of U.S. technology that had been showered on the North were mainly in bomb form, yet the ordinary Vietnamese was able to make a connection that eludes many American intellectuals between the spray of pellets from the "mother’ bomb and the candy hurled at children in the South by friendly G.I.’s, between the pellets and all the Saran-wrapped products of American industrial society which can no longer be separated into beneficial and deleterious, "good," and "bad."

Since nobody can live in a vacuum, nobody, whatever he thinks, is free to "drop out" — poor blacks rioting carry home whiskey and T.V. sets.

– Mary McCarthy

Tell them what? That the mystic warrior was a freak out side show?

– Sonny Crockett, Miami Vice (T.V.)

Blessed is he whose life has not tasted of evil. When god has shaken a house, the winds of madness lash its breed till the breed is done.

– Sophocles

Everything is functioning; only man himself is no longer.

– Hugo Ball

Whatever happens, we shall remain stupid.

– Gustave Flaubert