Category: Quotable

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade, ch. 2

CALLIE. I can’t connect with mountains, trees, the little animals—they snub me. You know how you can be with two other people and you’re all having a great time. Then the person sitting next to you says something in French and the two of them burst into laughter, best laugh anyone’s had all night. And you’re left out because you took Spanish in the seventh grade, not French. That’s what nature does to me. Speaks French to the other people at the table.

—Diana Son, Stop Kiss, sc. 1

MAX TARASOV. Arthur, no one come! You sell donut and no one wants donut anymore! People now, they eat yogurt and banana, not donut. And people who want donut can go to Duckin’ Donut and eat the shit cake! If they want coffee, they go to Starbuck and pay four dollars for caramel fuck-a-cheeto. You are only donut shop on North Side, you have said this. All the others close. Why? Because they are selling product no one want! Donut is like videotape, it is over! Time change everything, and donut has been left behind.

— Tracy Letts, Superior Donuts, act 1

Martin Luther King. Jr., addresses the crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, 28 August 1963:

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

The artifice lies in the selection of detail. In life, we can swivel our heads and eyes, but in fact we are like helpless cameras. We have a wide lens, and must take in whatever comes before us. Our memory selects for us, but not much like the way literary narrative selects. Our memories are aesthetically untalented.

—James Wood, How Fiction Works, §39

For most men and women these thirty years [between thirty-five and sixty-five] are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less, when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our recreations to one recreation, our friends to a few to whom were are anæsthetic; ending up at last in a solitary, desolate strong point that is not strong, where the shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘”O Russet Witch!”‘, iv

ROTHKO: Of course you like it—how can you not like it?! Everyone likes everything nowadays. They like the television and the phonograph and the soda pop and the shampoo and the Cracker Jack. Everything becomes everything else and it’s all nice and pretty and likable. Everything is fun in the sun! Where’s the discernment? Where’s the arbitration that separates what I like from what I respect, what I deem worthy, what has… listen to me now… significance.

—John Logan, Red, sc. 1

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, [Arnold] Schoenberg’s music no longer sounds so alien. It has radiated outward in unpredictable ways, finding alternative destinies in bebop jazz (the glassy chords of Thelonious Monk have a Schoenbergian tinge) and on movie soundtracks (horror movies need atonality as they need shadows on the walls of alleys). With the modernist revolution spintered into many factions, with composers gravitating back to tonality or moving on to something else, Schoenberg’s music no longer carries the threat that all music will sound like this. Still, it retains its Faustian aura. These intervals will always shake the air; they will never become second nature. That is at once their power and their fate.

—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, ch. 2, “Doctor Faust”

When he thought of his youth he could scarcely believe that his memories had anything at all to do with the absurd life he was now living, an observation, he knew, that was far from original. Somehow, he had thought that his old age would miraculously produce finer, subtler notions of—what?—life? But he was no better, no cleverer, no more insightful than any shuffling old bastard in the street, absurdly bundled against the slightest breeze.

—Gilbert Sorrentino, The Abyss of Human Illusion, VI (p. 7)

“…and his land cleared and planted with the seed Grandfather loaned him and him getting rich good and steady now——”

“Yes,” Shreve said; “Mr Coldfield: what was that?”

“I dont know,” Quentin said. “Nobody ever did know for certain. It was something about a bill of lading, some way he persuaded Mr Coldfield to use his credit: one of those things that when they work you were smart and when they dont you change your name and move to Texas…”

—William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, ch. VII

He saw the inside of the [subway] car for what it was: a controlled environment, a staging area, planned down to the last detail by people he would never know or see. No surprises in here, Lowboy said to himself. No accidents. He studied each element of the car with his new eyes, imagining it as a kind of blueprint…. He would never meet the people who’d drawn the blueprint, never have a chance to question them, but he could learn things just by looking at the car. You could see, for example, that they were fearful men. The pattern on the walls, which he’d always taken to be meaningless, was actually made up of thousands of miniature coats of arms, symbols of the authority of the state. The interior of the car was waterproof, the better to be hosed down in case of bloodshed. And the seats were arranged not for maximum efficiency, not to seat the greatest number of people comfortably and safely, but to express the designers’ fear with perfect clarity. No one sat with their back turned to anyone else.

—John Wray, Lowboy, p. 94

John Brunner anticipates comment-driven media:

“… and Puerto Rico today became the latest state to ratify the controversial dichromatism provision of United States eugenic legislation. This leaves only two havens for those who wish to bear disadvantaged children: Nevada and Louisiana. The defeat of the baby-farming lobby removes a long-time stigma from the fair brow of the Junior-but-One State—a congenital stigma, one may say, since the J-but-O State’s accession to hoodness coincided almost to the day with the first eugenic legislation concerned with haemophilia, phenylketonuria and congenital imbecility…”

* * *

“One fraction of a second, please—participant breakin coming up. Remember that only SCANALYZER’s participant breakin service is processed by General Technics’ Shalmaneser, the more correct response in the shorter quantum of time…”

* * *
“Two participant breakins! Number one: sorree, friend, but no—we are not wrong to say Puerto Rico’s decision leaves a mere two havens for the dissident. Isola does enjoy statehood, but the whole area of the Pacific its islands occupy is under martial law and you don’t get a pass for other than martial reasons. Thanks for asking us, though, it’s the way of the world, you’re my environment and I am yours, which is why we operate SCANALYZER as a two-way process…”

* * *

“Number the other: dichromatism is what’s commonly called colourblindness, and it is sure as sidereal time a congenital disability. Thank you, participant, thank you.”

—John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968), “the happening world (1)”