"Signaling Through the Flames..." A Compendium of Classic Cult Fiction Quotes
"If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames." --Artaud
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"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."
--1984, George Orwell, 1949
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
--Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick, 1968
"I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day."
--The Fall, Albert Camus, 1956
"I had seen the results of that ultimately humane treatment, the frontal lobotomy. For this, they remove a chunk of skull in the forehead area, stick an instrument not unlike an ice pick down to the brain where, with a few curt brushes, they scrape away all grief, all rage, all violence, all the things that make us Man, leaving one great hulk of loonily smiling protoplasm."
--A Fan's Notes, Frederick Exley, 1968
"Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?"
--Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk, 1996
"Luca Brasi was indeed a man to frighten the devil in hell himself. Short, squat, massive-skulled, his presence sent out alarm bells of danger. His face was stamped into a mask of fury. The eyes were brown but with none of the warmth of that color, more a deadly tan. The mouth was not so much cruel as lifeless; thin, rubbery and the color of veal . . . Luca Brasi did not fear the police, he did not fear society, he did not fear God, he did not fear hell, he did not fear or love his fellow man. But he had elected, he had chosen, to fear and love Don Corleone."
--The Godfather, Mario Puzo, 1969
"We live, as we dream--alone."
--Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, 1902
'From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.'
--The High Window, Raymond Chandler, 1942
“A singular sense of confusion suddenly darted through my head. I stumbled on, determined not to heed it; but I grew worse and worse, and was forced at last to sit down on a step. My whole being underwent a change, as if something had slid aside in my inner self, or as if a curtain or tissue of my brain was rent in two.”
—Hunger, Knut Hamsun, 1890
"When one is invisible he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other, depending upon who happens to be looking through him at the time. Well, now I've been trying to look through myself, and there's risk in it. I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied--not even I. On the other hand, I've never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to 'justify' and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs; or when I've tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear." --Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, 1952
"True, we have got into the habit of admiring colossal bandits, whose opulence is revered by the entire world, yet whose existence, once we stop to examine it, proves to be one long crime repeated ad infinitum, but those same bandits are heaped with glory, honors, and power, their crimes are hallowed by the law of the land, whereas, as far back in history as the eye can see--and history, as you know, is my business--everything conspires to show that a venial theft, especially of inglorious foodstuffs, such as bread crusts, ham, or cheese, unfailingly subjects its perpetrator to irreparable opprobium, the automatic dishonor, and inexpiable shame, and this for two reasons, first because the perpetrator of such an offense is usually poor, which in itself connotes basic unworthiness, and secondly because his act implies, as it were, a tacit reproach to the community."
--Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, 1934
"Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed. He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world."
--Lullaby, Chuck Palahniuk, 2003
"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."
--Moby Dick, Herman Melville, 1851
"Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit--Kid, it was tasty . . ."
--Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs, 1959
"How helpless they all looked in the ugliness of sleep. A third of life spent unconscious and corpselike. And some, the great majority, stumbled through their waking hours scarcely more awake, helpless in the face of destiny. They stumbled down a dark alley toward their deaths. They sent exploring feelers into the light and met fire and writhed back again into the darkness of their blind groping."
--Nightmare Alley, William Lindsay Gresham, 1946
". . . I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!"
--On the Road, Jack Kerouac, 1957
"Old Rawler. Cut both nuts off and bled to death, sitting right on the can in the latrine, half a dozen people in there with him didn't know it till he fell off to the floor, dead. What makes people so impatient is what I can't figure; all the guy had to do was wait."
--One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey, 1962
"I wrote the Air Force back then, asking for details about the raid on Dresden, who ordered it, how many planes did it, what desirable results they had been and so on. I was answered by a man who, like myself, was in public relations. He said that he was sorry, but that the information was top secret still. I read the letter out loud to my wife, and I said, 'Secret? My God--from whom?'"
--Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut, 1966
"My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I begin to believe that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes existence. My memories flash like clips of film from unrelated movies. I wonder, suddenly, if I am alive. I know I'm not dead, but am I alive? I look into the memories for reassurance, searching for signs of life."
--Stop-Time, Frank Conroy, 1967
"What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit. That, I believe would be more miraculous than anything which man has looked forward to. It would be miraculous because it would be undreamed of. It would be more miraculous than even the wildest dream because anybody could imagine the possibility but nobody ever has, and probably nobody ever again will."
--Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller, 1934
"Where are the children I might have wanted? You may suppose I might have wanted them. Drowned. To the accompaniment of the rattling of a thousand douche bags."
--Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowery, 1947
"It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood."
--Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson, 1919
"Human relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death--in a cesspool."
--Women, Charles Bukowski, 1978
"How I loathed the traitor, Bob Ford, one of the James boys gang, who shot Jesse when his back was turned, for a reward! How I rejoiced to read that Ford was almost lynched by friends and admirers of Jesse, and had to be locked in the strongest jail in the state to protect him from a mobbing. I finished the story entirely and wholly in sympathy with the James boys, and all other hunted, outlawed, and outraged men."
--You Can't Win, Jack Black, 1926
Coda
“There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.” —Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society, 1947