quips
"Is good!"
"Manhattan's sinking like a rock / Into the filfthy Hudson, what a shock / They wrote a book about it, / They said it was like ancient Rome / The perfume burned his eyes / Holding tightly to her thighs / And something flickered for a moment / And then it vanished and was gone."
-- Lou Reed, Romeo Had Juliette from the album entitled New York
"'Holy crap!' he says. 'Scared the snot out of me. I've had a few snorts. Thank God. But good sneaking. If you set out to do what I think you're going to set out to do, you'll need to be good at sneaking. Are you? Are you going to set out to do what I think you're going to set out to do? I see by your eyes that the answer is yes! You swashbuckler! Have you ever got panache and verve and moxie! Exciting. I only wish my sister was a renegade whore about to be sold into slavery. You've talked to Bentley? Your mind's at ease?'
"'Yes,' I say. 'I'm ready.'
"'Ah, youth!' he says, then removes my bracelet and hands me a prescription form with directions to Borbett's Taos estate written on the back.
"'Kindly keep quiet vis-a-vis your source,' he says. 'If not, I may find myself Expelled and forced to care for the hateful rabble gratis in some real-world clinic. Yikes, would that ever bite! Best of luck, pal. Keep your head down. Don't write me any letters or I might get nailed.'"
"I dream of Limbo, a tiny room full of dull people eternally discussing their dental work and sipping lukewarm tea."
-- George Saunders, "Bounty," from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
"This nose-consciousness resulted at last in the writing of a story, The Nose, which is verily a hymn to that organ. A Freudian might suggest that in Gogol's topsy-turvy world human beings are turned upside down (in 1841 Gogol coolly declared that a council of doctors in Paris had found his stomach to be placed upside down) so that the part of the nose is played by some other organ and vice-versa."
-- Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol
"Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world. The first moments of sleep are an image of death; a hazy torpor grips our thoughts and it becomes impossible for us to determine the exact instant when the 'I', under another form, continues the task of existence. Little by little a vague underground cavern grows lighter and the pale gravely immobile shapes that live in limbo detach themselves from the shadows and the night. Then the picture takes form, a new brightness illumines these strange apparitions and gives them movement. The spirit world opens before us."
-- Gerard de Nerval, Aurelia
"Here I am on the Breton shore. Let the towns sparkle in the evening. My day is done; I am leaving Europe. The sea air will scorch my lungs; odd climates will tan me. To swim, to trample the grass, to hunt, above all, to smoke; to drink liquors strong as boiling metal, -- as my dear ancestors did around their fires.
"I shall come back, with limbs of iron, my skin dark, my eye furious: from my mask, people will judge me a member of a powerful race. I shall have gold: I shall be idle and brutal. Women take care of these ferocious invalids on their return from torrid countries. I shall be involved in political affairs. Saved.
"At present I am cursed. I abhor my fatherland. The best thing of all is a very drunken sleep, on the beach."
-- Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
"Welcome, oh life! I go for the millionth time to encounter the reality of experience, and to forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race."
-- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
"Life's just a mood ring we're not allowed to see."
-- They Might Be Giants, found in the album They Might Be Giants
"Always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
-- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / by the false azure of the window-pane."
-- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
"Q: Have you ever inhaled?
"A: Oh, sure. I don't know anyone who hasn't."
-- Ed Koch, former mayor of New York
"Thank you for the card with the cartoon nurse / But you see there's nothing wrong with me"
-- They Might Be Giants, Destination Moon from the album John Henry