A Leak In The Safe

The Insect at the Home of a Mutual Friend : QUOTEBAG

Right now we’d like to dedicate this to everybody here with hearts, any kind of hearts, and ears – it goes something like this here…

– Jimi Hendrix

At least I am speaking to someone who understands me, and not to one of the cabbages in whose midst I have been vegetating since morning.

– Laclos

I don’t think I’d ever plan anything out carefully, and certainly not that. If I went to the devil it would be because I wanted to, or because it’s a good drug, or because I don’t give a damn for my idiotic body of a woman anyway.

He’s only trying to be modern and brutal and all that, poor dear. Don’t mind him.

– Jean Rhys

Observe her carefully when she is sitting alone, thinking; why she looks like one foredestined to everything accursed and damnable in the world.

– Dostoevsky

This warped, decadent youth was once an angelic child.

– August Strindberg

"What?" said Mrs. Reed under her breath: her usually cold composed grey eye became troubled with a look of fear: she took her hand from my arm and looked at me as if she really did not know if I were child or fiend.

– Charlotte Bronte

I myself have a horror of the commonplace, and I dream only of strange adventures, strong passions, delirious ecstasies, bizarre and difficult situations, and I have to find pure and simple happiness that way, and, try as I may, I haven’t been able to find another.

– Theophile Gautier

Delirium passes the time, but it’s ticklish when anyone’s around.

– Celine

"But if Mr. Holgrave is a lawless person!" remonstrated Phoebe, a part of whose essence it was to keep within the limits of law.

"Oh!" said Hepzibah, carelessly – for, formal as she was, still in her life experience, she had gnashed her teeth against human law, "I suppose he has a law of his own!"

– Nathaniel Hawthorne

He was in a fair way to do himself lasting harm, floundering between worlds passed and worlds coming, which had a habit of crushing men who stayed too long at the point of contact.

– Henry Adams

He startles those who do not like to be startled, and does not compose those who wish to be composed.

– Walter Bageliot

Such is the unhappy age in which we live that not even the strangest aberrations are a cure for boredom.

– Stendhal

Until this time his career could be summed up as that of a moderately independent artist with a conservative background, who had offended a few dogmatic academicians, but from 1885 on he offended nearly everyone, even some of his closest associates.

– John David Farmer

He was regarded as a true visionary artist, or one who portrays through art his personal visions of the "divine light" and out of body experiences of "union with the Mother Goddess" i.e. sexual intercourse with demons.

– Barbara Aho

The fact is that modern artists are gnostics and practice things that the priests think are long forgotten; perhaps even commit sins that are no longer thought possible.

What Nietzsche calls "decadence" and Marx calls the "ideological superstructure" is here simply called the state university.

– Hugo Ball

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened by fact, by history, by process, by necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different; and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.

– Richard Wright

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