The First and Foremost

Just because there aren't enough places on the web where people have compiled a useless page of quotes, I now present you with mine.

Stealing the Words of Others Since 1988

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." - Oscar Wilde


"Always remember you are unique, just like everyone else." - Anonymous


"There are only patterns. Patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns, patterns hidden by patterns, patterns within patterns." - Chuck Palahniuk


"People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because then what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown." - Chuck Palahniuk


"Here are condoms lined with a topical anesthetic for prolonged action. What a paradox. You don't feel anything but you can fuck for hours. This really seems to miss the point. I want my whole life to be lined with topical anesthetic." - Chuck Palahniuk


"He [God] just seems so man-made to me. There are so many theories, and not everyone can be right. It's human nature to need a religious crutch, and I don't begrudge anyone that. I just don't need one." - Janeane Garofalo


"Half of life is fucking up--the other half is dealing with it." -Henry Rollins


"Don't do anything by the half. If you love someone, love them with all your soul. When you go to work, work your ass off. When you hate someone, hate them until it hurts." - Henry Rollins


"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it." - Ferris Bueller's Day off


"Norman: 'She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven't you?'" - Psycho


"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells." - Dr. Seuss


"But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Who are you?" said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice repilied, rather shyly,
"I-I hardly know, sir, just at present-at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then." - Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland


"Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
That's when you know you've found somebody special.
When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence." - Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction


"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I have ever known." - Chuck Palahniuk


"My one regret in life is that I am not someone else." - Woody Allen


"Be who you are and say what you mean, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss


"You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? That idea of home is gone. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place." - Garden State


"The real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the places that look wrong and stupid and foolish." - Chuck Palahniuk


"After all, each one of us is little more than the meager residue of the infinite unrealized possibilties of our lives." - J.G. Ballard


"The only reason people ask you about your weekend is so they can tell you about theirs." - Chuck Palahniuk


"If there's any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed, but who cares, really? The answer must be in the attempt." - Before Sunrise


"An entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables: slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing car and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man--no purpose or place. We have no great war. No great depression. Our great war's a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars . . . but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact and we're very, very pissed off." - Chuck Palahniuk


"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'" - Jack Kerouac


"Things aren't the way they are, they're the way you are." - Anais Nin


"Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers...choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind- numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose a future. Choose life...But why would I want to do a thing like that?" - Irvine Welsh


"In conversation do you listen, or wait to talk?" - Pulp Fiction


" This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time." - Chuck Palahniuk


"You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else." - Chuck Palahniuk


"Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering." - Fyodor Dosteovsky


"The true New Yorker secretly believs that anyone living anywhere else has got to be, in some sense, kidding." - John Updike


"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction... The chain reaction of evil -- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the darkness of annihilation." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.


"Another thing is no matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when a pool of their blood edges too close." - Palahniuk


"The truth is I wasn't a rocket scientist to begin with, and every day I'm losing ground. I'm not stupid, but I'm getting there." - Palahniuk


"Find out what you're afraid of and go live there." - Palahniuk


"That's what I love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody else. It's so beautiful and powerful and beyond feeling for anything or anybody, that's what I love about fire." - Palahniuk


"All God does it watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring." - Palahniuk


"The only reason why we ask other people about their weekend is so we can tell them about our own." - Palahniuk


"When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?" - Palahniuk


"And so castles made of sand melt into the sea, eventually."- Jimi Hendrix


"And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche


"All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost." - JRR Tolkien


"What you don't understand you can make mean anything." - Palahniuk


"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting." - e.e. cummings


"And the funniest thing is, our cells are completely regenerating every seven years. We've already become completely different people several times over, and yet, we always remain quintessentially ourselves." - Richard Linklater's, Waking Life


"Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese fingertrap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it." - Philip K. Dick


"Reality is that in which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."- Philip K. Dick


"Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way" - Roger Waters


"I mean, after all; you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's a sort of bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So, I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with, we can make it." - Philip K. Dick


"Imagination is a quality given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is." - Oscar Wilde


"Reality is the original Rorschach." - Principia Discordia


"Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on a Sunday."- Woody Allen


"For me, love must be ugly, looks must be divine, and death must be beautiful." - Salvador Dali


"People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent." - Bob Dylan


"Beauty is the conscious sum of all our perversions." - Salvador Dali


"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled the cannot become conscious." - George Orwell


"When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before." - Mae West


"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." - Albert Einstein


"A person's life story is equal to what they have plus what they want most in the world, minus what they're actually willing to sacrifice for it." - Craig Clevenger


"for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis" - e.e. cummings


"It's better to burn out, than to fade away." - Neil Young


"More and more everything in my life was a fix for an earlier fix for an earlier fix until I forget what the original problem was." - Palahniuk


"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."- Albert Einstein


"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will." - Chuck Palahniuk


"More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself." - Palahniuk


"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember the sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace." - Palahniuk


"Everyone's in their own personal coma." - Palahniuk


"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." - Soren Kierkegaard


"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over and over again honestly, till the take root in our personal experience." - Johann von Goethe


"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim it too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo Buonarroti


Dialogue from Six Feet Under:

Nathaniel: You're missing the point.
David: There is no point. That's the point. Isn't it?
Nathaniel: Don't give me this phony, existential bullshit. I expect better from you. The point is right in front of your face.
David: Well, I'm sorry but I don't see it.
Nathaniel: You're not even grateful are you?
David: Grateful? For the worst fucking experience of my life?
Nathaniel: You hold onto your pain like it means something. Like it's worth something. Well let me tell you something. It's not worth shit. Let it go. Infinite possibilities and all he can do is whine.
David: Well, what am I supposed to do?
Nathaniel: What do you think? You can do anything, you lucky bastard. You're alive. What's a little pain compared to that?
David: It can't be that simple.
Nathaniel: What if it is.


"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope some day you'll join us and the world will live as one." - John Lennon


"Do not go gently into that good night. Old age should burn and rage at the close of the day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light." - Dylan Thomas


"Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering--and it's all over much too soon." - Woody Allen


"Drugs have taught an entire generation of Americans the metric system. "- PJ O'Rourke


"Get busy living, or get busy dying." - Stephen King


"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. " - Sylvia Plath


"It's never too late to be what you might have been." - George Eliot


"No matter how cynical you are, you can't keep up." - Woody Allen


"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein


"The future ain't what it used to be." - Yogi Berra


"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night." - Edgar Allan Poe


"We're all fucked. It helps to remember this." - George Carlin


"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." - Plato


"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has not choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet." - Franz Kafka


"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of." - Albert Camus


"You're only given a little spark of madness. You musn't lose it". - Robin Williams


"How does it feel, to be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?" - Bob Dylan


"Ballet: Men wearing pants so tight that you can tell what religion they are." - Robin Williams


"Draw a crazy picture. Write a nutty poem. Sing a mumble-gumble song. Whistle through your comb. Do a loony-goony dance 'cross the kitchen floor. Put something silly in the world, that ain't been there before." - Shel Silverstein


"I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy." - JD Salinger


"I like too many things and get all confused and hung up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what is does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion." - Jack Kerouac


"Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?" - Edgar Allan Poe


"Now the years are rolling by and they're rocking evenly, and I'm older than I once was, younger than I'll be--that's not unusual. Nor is it strange that after changes upon changes we are more or less the same. After changes we are more or less the same." - Paul Simon


"The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon." - Franz Kafka


"The word motherfucker is not just an expression. It's a person, place, or thing." - Bernie Mac


"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but, 'That's funny...'" - Isaac Asimov

Vizzini: He didn't fall? Inconceivable!
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
- The Princess Bride

"A person is not old until regrets take the place of dreams." - John Barrymore


"I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched." - EdgarAllan Poe


"What I want to do and what I do are two separate things. If we all went around doing what we wanted all the time, there'd be chaos." -Simon Birch


"Our very hopes belied our fears,
Our fears our hopes belied;
We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died." - Thomas Hood


"She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all."
-Bob Dylan

"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute--and it's longer than any hour.That's relativity." - Albert Einstein

"I flee who chases me, and chase who flees me." - Ovid


"Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.” - Anaïs Nin


"If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms life offers you." - T. S. Eliot


"Men learn to love the women they are attracted to and women become attracted to the men they love." - from Sex, Lies, & Videotape


"Much Madness is divinest Sense--
To a discerning Eye--
Much Sense--the starkest Madness."
- Emily Dickinson


"Mankind are very odd creatures: one half censure what they practice, the other half practice what they censure." - Benjamin Franklin


"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." - John Milton


"It is not miracles that generate faith, but faith that generates miracles." - Fyodor Dostoevsky


“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “At least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know.” - Lewis Carrol


"Which is it, is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders?" - Friedrich Nietzsche


"When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait." - Pablo Picasso

"O powerful love, that in some respects makes a beast a man, in some other, a man a beast."-William Shakespeare


"The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new." - Dr. Samuel Johnson


"Don't worry that other people don't know you; worry that you don't know other people." -Confucius


"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." - Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes

The Origin of Love, from Hedwig and the Angry Itch soundtrack:

"When the earth was still flat,
And the clouds made of fire,
And mountains stretched up to the sky,
Sometimes higher,
Folks roamed the earth
Like big rolling kegs.
They had two sets of arms.
They had two sets of legs.
They had two faces peering
Out of one giant head
So they could watch all around them
As they talked; while they read.
And they never knew nothing of love.
It was before the origin of love.
The origin of love
And there were three sexes then,
One that looked like two men
Glued up back to back,
Called the children of the sun.
And similar in shape and girth
Were the children of the earth.
They looked like two girls
Rolled up in one.
And the children of the moon
Were like a fork shoved on a spoon.
They were part sun, part earth
Part daughter, part son.
The origin of love
Now the gods grew quite scared
Of our strength and defiance
And Thor said,
'I'm gonna kill them all
With my hammer,
Like I killed the giants.'
And Zeus said, 'No,
You better let me
Use my lightening, like scissors,
Like I cut the legs off the whales
And dinosaurs into lizards.'
Then he grabbed up some bolts
And he let out a laugh,
Said, 'I'll split them right down the middle.
Gonna cut them right up in half.'
And then storm clouds gathered above
Into great balls of fire
And then fire shot down
From the sky in bolts
Like shining blades
Of a knife.
And it ripped
Right through the flesh
Of the children of the sun
And the moon
And the earth.
And some Indian god
Sewed the wound up into a hole,
Pulled it round to our belly
To remind us of the price we pay.
And Osiris and the gods of the Nile
Gathered up a big storm
To blow a hurricane,
To scatter us away,
In a flood of wind and rain,
And a sea of tidal waves,
To wash us all away,
And if we don't behave
They'll cut us down again
And we'll be hopping round on one foot
And looking through one eye.
Last time I saw you
We had just split in two.
You were looking at me.
I was looking at you.
You had a way so familiar,
But I could not recognize,
Cause you had blood on your face;
I had blood in my eyes.
But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine.
That's the pain,
Cuts a straight line
Down through the heart;
We called it love.
So we wrapped our arms around each other,
Trying to shove ourselves back together.
We were making love,
Making love.
It was a cold dark evening,
Such a long time ago,
When by the mighty hand of Jove,
It was the sad story
How we became
Lonely two-legged creatures,
It's the story of
The origin of love.
That's the origin of love."

For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights