21 quotes
There is no fashion so absurd, even grotesque, that it cannot be adopted, given two things: the authority of the fashion-setter (Dior, Jackie Onassis) and the vacuity or noughtness of the consumer.
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983)
Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it.
The Moviegoer (1961)
What a man can be the next minute bears no relation to what he is or what he was the minute before.
The Last Gentleman (1966)
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.
The Moviegoer (1961)
As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
The Moviegoer (1961)
You can get all A's and still flunk life.
The Second Coming (1980)
You don't ever really learn anything you didn't know when you were thirteen.
The Second Coming (1980)
A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new.
The Moviegoer (1961)
Do you know where tenderness always leads? ... To the gas chamber.
Good-looking and amiable as he was, however, he did not strike one as remarkable. People usually told him the same joke two or three times.
The Last Gentleman (1966)
The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
The Moviegoer (1961)
Peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
The Second Coming (1980)
Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures?
The Message in the Bottle (1975)
I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free. (2.12).
The Moviegoer (1961)
Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983)
She can only believe I am serious in her own fashion of being serious: as an antic sort of seriousness, which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness.
The Moviegoer (1961)
Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos — novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes — you are beyond doubt the strangest ...
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983)
I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.
The Moviegoer (1961)
Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive. (2.9).
The Moviegoer (1961)
A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.
The Moviegoer (1961)