If the quote needs a little explantion, so be it.


"Yum. Yak Butter." Mama, "The Brothers K"

I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before; which is to say, our lives?

So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.

Clive Barker, Sacrament

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." -- H.P. Lovecraft

This made me thing of the WGB...

upon reading a critical review
it's difficult to accept
and you look around the room
for the person they are talking
about.

he's not there
he's not here.
he's gone.

by the time they get your book you
are no longer your
book.
you are on the next page,
the next
book.

and worse,
they don't even get the old books right.
you are given credit for things you don't
deserve, for insights that aren't
there.

people read themselves into books, altering
what thay need and discarding what they
don't.

good critics are as rare as good
writers.
and whether I get a good review or a
bad one
I take neither
seriously.

I am on the next page.
the next book.

Charles Bukowski

There's a million, and I can never remember them all. And I'm here without my copy of Catch-22.

"Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, others have mediocrity thrust upon them." Speaking about Major Major Major in Catch-22.

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." Opening pages, DNA's HHGTTG.

Not really from a book, but it was on the dust jacket of a copy of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast: "You have written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one sentence. Write the truest sentence you know." Hemingway, in a letter to a friend. It's sort of my mantra.

Experience takes on dramatic forms more akin to music unfolding diachronically through time than a pictorial description synchronously present... A melody is a patterned sequence of notes of different pitches...The melody does not consist of the notes separately or alone, but in the form generated by the sequence of the ratios of the pitches of the notes. These ratios are not themselves notes. They are the differences between the notes... If the music gets to us, there is an instant sympathetic vibration through which we resonate and commune with it... A melody reverberates and regenerates feeling, mood, atmosphere, nuances of pathos, that no scientific discourse can convey, let alone scientific method begin to study...

R.D. Laing - The Voice of Experience (Gotta love a renegade psychiatrist)

quote:

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"Angie," he said, "when Rudy scanned you, he found something in your head."
She stopped chewing.
"He didn't know what it was. Something someone put there, maybe when you were a lot younger. Do you know what I mean?"
She nodded.
"Do you know what it is?"
She swallowed. "No."
"But you know who put it there?"
"Yes."
"Your father?"
"Yes."
"Do you know why?"
"Because I was sick."
"How were you sick?"
"I wasn't smart enough."

---

____________________________________________
The text above is mental property of William Gibson, copyright violations will be prosecuted and accused.

This one from A Scanner Darkly by PKD.

And this from All Tomorrow's Parties.

I think there's a pattern there.

Wasn't there a thread like this for strictly Gibson quotes? I love that thing...

quote:

---

I think there's a pattern there.

---

yes, i recognize it, too.

bu dum ba tschhh!

[applause]

[bows graciously, returns to work]

this one's specially for gromit and martin. (i'm sorry i don't have the book with me so it may not be totally accurate. )

'Roger, aged seven, and no longer the youngest of the family, ran in wide zig zags, to and fro up the steep hill to Holly Howe, the farmhouse where they had been staying for part of the summer holidays.'

that's the opening sentence of 'swallows and amazons' by arthur ransome.

"The French," he said, with great conviction, "know nothing about coffee." Paco, in Count Zero.

"and please let it be true"

mona in MLO

Steps sounded on the woodem stairs, and counting, "Seven and eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve and that's the dozen." Mrs Dixon was coming to tell the Callum children that it was time to get up.

"you'll be coom fer the milk"

Something dark:

Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated. We know this well, we who have passed into the Realm of Terror, who skulk in eternal dusk among the scenes of our former lives, invisible even to ourselves and one another, yet hiding forlorn in lonely places; yearning for speech with our loved ones, yet dumb, and as fearful of them as they of us. Sometimes the disability is removed, the law suspended: by the deathless power of love or hate we break the spell "” we are seen by those whom we would warn, console, or punish. What form we seem to them to bear we know not; we know only that we terrify even those whom we most wish to comfort, and from whom we most crave tenderness and sympathy.

Ambrose Bierce, The Moonlit Road

"'And he goes around killing people?' said Mort. He shook his head. 'There's no justice.'

Death sighed. NO, he said, handing his drink to a page who was surprised to find he was suddenly holding an empty glass, THERE'S JUST ME." - Terry Pratchett, Mort



The opening to Christopher Brookmyre's One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night:

"William Connor was standing outside a disused cattleshed on a bright Highland summer's morning, ankle-deep in cowshit, liquidised mercenary raining splashily down about his head from the crisp blue sky above. He wasn't an overly superstitious man, but this was precisely the sort of thing that tended to make him wonder whether fate wasn't trying to drop just the subtlest of hints.

He reached up reluctantly and wiped the gore from his eyelids, then, grimacing, ran a hand through his caked hair, shaking it at the wrist in a whiplash motion. The slick red goo made a wet snicking sound as it licked the dung-carpeted ground. Sighing, he turned around languorously to face Dawson, who was as inevitably likely to be right behind him as he was extremely unlikely to be impressed. In fact, Dawson's state of impressedness had begun at its default low and pursued a steepening downward trajectory since his arrival an hour back."

quote:

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Mickah took the drum home with him. His da, the only harder man than Mickah in Barrytown, burned the sticks. His ma bought him a new set.

---

-Roddy Doyle, The Commitments