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“You will find men like him in all the world’s religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No-one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor - but they have few followers now.”
(Arthur C. Clarke, 1954, Childhood’s End)
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‘I hope you've spared no expense. I should like the hearse to be followed by a long string of empty coaches, and I should like the horses to wear tall nodding plumes, and there should be a vast number of mutes with long streamers on their hats. I like the thought of all those empty coaches.’
‘As the cost of the funeral will apparently fall on me and I’m not over-flush just now, I’ve tried to make it as moderate as possible.’
‘But, my dear fellow, in that case, why didn’t you get him a pauper’s funeral? There would have been something poetic in that. You have an unerring instinct for mediocrity.’
(W. Somerset Maugham, 1915, Of Human Bondage)
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‘Why d’you read then?’
‘Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me, and I can't get anything more if I read it a dozen times. You see, it seems to me, one's like a closed bud, and most of what one reads and does has no effect at all; but there are certain things that have a peculiar significance for one, and they open a petal; and the petals open one by one; and at last the flower is there.’
(W. Somerset Maugham, 1915, Of Human Bondage)
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‘It seems a pity you wasted two years in Paris,’ said Hayward.
‘Waste? Look at the movement of that child, look at the pattern which the sun makes on the ground, shining through the trees, look at that sky — why, I should never have seen that sky if I hadn't been to Paris.’
(W. Somerset Maugham, 1915, Of Human Bondage)
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‘There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood. I have nothing but contempt for the people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off. The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he writes or paints, who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art.’
(W. Somerset Maugham, 1915, Of Human Bondage)
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‘You rear like a frightened colt, because I use a word to which your Christianity ascribes a deprecatory meaning. You have a hierarchy of values; pleasure is at the bottom of the ladder, and you speak with a little thrill of self-satisfaction of duty, charity and truthfulness. You think pleasure is only of the senses; the wretched slaves who manufactured your morality despised a satisfaction which they had small means of enjoying. You would not be so frightened if I had spoken of happiness instead of pleasure: it sounds less shocking, and your mind wanders from the sty of Epicurus to his garden. But I will speak of pleasure, for I see that men aim at that, and I do not know that they aim at happiness. It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in giving alms he is charitable; if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whisky and soda. I less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.’
‘But have you never known people do things they didn't want to instead of things they did?’
‘No. You put your question foolishly. What you mean is that people accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure. The objection is as foolish as your manner of putting it. It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the senses; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it. It is a law of creation. If it were possible for men to prefer pain to pleasure the human race would have long since become extinct’
(W. Somerset Maugham, 1915, Of Human Bondage)
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We listened to them, but it was clear they’d received too much therapy to know the truth.
(Jeffrey Eugenides, 1993, The Virgin Suicides)
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“Me? you want me to keep it?”
“‘Yes,’ Judith said. ‘Or destroy it. As you like. Read it if you like or don’t read it if you like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you don’t know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can’t matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it’s all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they dont even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn’t matter. And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something - a scrap of paper - something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone can’t be is because it never can become was because it can’t ever die or perish…’
(William Faulkner, 1936, Absalom, Absalom!)
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Withdrawal from booze and pharmaceuticals is a bit like white-knuckling your way through a rough flight in an electric storm. Unfortunately, there’s another element involved, a type of fear that doesn’t have a name. It’s deep down in the id and produces a sense of anxiety that causes hyperventilation and night sweats. You don’t get to leave your fear on the plane. Your skin becomes your prison, and you take it with you everyplace you go. You walk the floor. You hide your thoughts from others. You eat a half gallon of ice cream in one sitting. You crosshatch the tops of your teeth in your sleep. Every mistake or misdeed or sin in your life, no matter how many times you’ve owned up to it, re-creates itself and takes a fresh bite out of your heart the moment you wake.
That’s why mainline cons say everybody stacks time; it depends on where you stack it, but you stack it just the same.
When the house finally comes down on your head, you conclude that ice cream is a poor surrogate for that old-time full-throttle-and-fuck-it rock and roll, and there’s nothing like four fingers of Jack in a mug filled with shaved ice and a beer on the side or maybe a little weed or a few yellow jackets to really light up the basement.
For those who don’t want to run up their bar tab or put themselves at the mercies of a drug dealer, there’s another recourse. You can go on what is called a dry drunk. You can stoke your anger the moment you open your eyes in the morning and feed it through the day, in the same way that someone incrementally tosses sticks on a controlled fire. Your anger allows you to mentally type up your own menu, with many choices on it. You can become a moralist and a reformer and make the lives of other people miserable. You can scapegoat others and inflame street mobs or highjack religion and wage wars in the name of a holy cause. You can spit in the soup from morning to night and stay as high as a helium balloon in a windstorm without ever breaking a sweat. When a drunk tells you he doesn’t have a problem anymore because he has quit drinking, flee his presence as quickly as possible.
(James Lee Burke, 2012, Creole Belle)
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The queues had grown longer outside the Metrodrome. Emerging from the cinema, Inspector Cadover scowled at them as he strode away. Here were people unaware that at their back hurried Time’s wingéd chariot ... people giving half an evening to nuzzling nearer to the armed, the arrogant, the amorous lady. And beyond that less than paper-thin illusion what awaited them? Deserts of vast eternity, Cadover told himself.
(Michael Innes, 1949, The Journeying Boy)
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‘You think I’m an alcoholic or something?’
‘I think you’re a bundle of nerves. Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms…’
(Ross MacDonald, 1963, The Chill)
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What possesses people? Unhappiness, always. Happiness is otherwise occupied. It has an object on which to focus. It has daisies, it has snowdrifts. Unhappiness opens up the void, which then requires filling.
(Zadie Smith, 2023, The Fraud)
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“Because the day is nigh,” proclaims Gutalin. “Because the pale horse has been saddled, and the rider has put a foot in the stirrup. And futile are the prayers of the worshippers of Satan. And only those who renounced him shall be saved. Thou of human flesh, whom Satan has seduced, who play with his toys and covet his treasures - I tell thee, thou art blind! Awake fools, before it is too late! Stamp on the devil’s baubles!” Here he comes to an abrupt halt, as if forgetting what comes next. “Can I get a drink in this place?” He asks in a different voice. “Where am I? You know, Red, I got fired again. An agitator, they said. I was telling them, ‘Awake, you’re blind, plunging into the abyss and dragging other blind men behind you!’ They just laughed.
(Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, 1972, Roadside Picnic)
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It takes a while for us to realise that our lives have no plot. At first we imagine ourselves into great struggles of darkness and light, heroes in our Levi’s or pajamas, impervious to the gravity that pulls down all others. Later on we contrive scenes in which the world’s events circle like moons about us - like moths about our porch lights. Then at last, painfully, we begin to understand that the world doesn’t even acknowledge our existence. We are the things that happen to us, the people we’ve known, nothing more.
(James Sallis, 1994, Black Hornet)
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… and he also spent a good deal of money. But there is this comfort in great affairs, that whatever you spend on yourself can be no more than a trifle. Champagne or ginger-beer are all the same when you stand to win or lose thousands.
(Anthony Trollope, 1875, The Way We Live Now)
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‘Bad; of course it is bad,’ he said to a young friend who was working with him on his periodical. ‘Who doubts that? How many very bad things are there that we do! But if we were to attempt to reform all our bad ways at once, we should never do any good thing. I am not strong enough to put the world straight, and I doubt if you are.’
(Anthony Trollope, 1875, The Way We Live Now)
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He thought too of the swift gangsterization of this society, which in the last resort must be a product of himself and of the other people who lived in it and had a share in its creation.
(Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, 1967, The Man On The Balcony)
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