William T. Vollmann Quotes

Regardless of its textual component, Noh is ultimately indescribable, like sexual ecstasy; what consoles me for my failure of language is the fact that so is everything else. Moreover, Noh aspires to indescribability.

The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles…

Thus the tragedy of Venus: Everybody wants her, and so our goddess has become prey.

It was about as easy getting the Statue of Liberty to spread cunny, which did take some dynamite persuasion.

Across the street an addict was mumbling, his words, like Dan Smooth’s, reminiscent of the structure of graphite, which is to say comprised of slender hexagonal plates of atoms which slough off at a touch like the multitudinous crusts of a Turkish pastry.

Lecktrickery?” grinned the fool boys, rubbing their rabbits’ feet against the spell of these longest syllables in all Tarnation.

But the remarkable thing about the beetles was their sensitivity to all the grammar and directives and slogans and even unstated desires of the ant world, which they learned to manipulate. They first memorized the proper antenna-vibration and foreleg-tap which the ants themselves used to request food. The poor workers, busy going here and there and back again all day and never getting a chance to think, automatically assumed that these fearsome strangers had been authorized by the Central Committee since they knew the password, and so they regurgitated a drop or two of fruit juice on cue, much the same as when one is traveling across Europe or Asia on the train and a person in uniform requests one’s passport, one’s ticket, takes them away, and comes back, or else does not come back, having sold them; a badge and a superior manner can obtain anything in this world.

as I departed his sad life resembled the feeling when the train accelerates and the yard sinks safely behind; I am free and for some indefinite period, which while it lasts is as good as forever, my own sad life, with its rules, necessities and railroad bulls, will not be able to catch me.

Standing on your own feet, naturally, is as tiresome and dangerous as standing your ground; and when the wild dogs begin to circle grinning round you with their dripping tongues hanging out and you know that with mock servility they like to go for your toes first, why, then, you should stand on someone else’s feet, or head if necessary. It is a point of faith for me never to be Hitler; he stood his ground in his own two shoes in his own little hole almost to the end, the fool. But I may disguise myself as any other animate or inanimate object in what follows. I can be eight lame women with falsies, eight cracked chamber pots, or — let’s get right to the point — a gladiator who is actually constructed of old clothes, brooms, and a paper plate with a face daubed on in finger-paints, not to mention two vagrants inside each shirt-sleeve and pant-leg, moving Goliath’s limbs at my say-so; but as long as you believe in the gladiator, you are whipped, and the Museum people will set out on your track, and then once they catch you, don’t think I won’t come study your exhibit until I can convince your own sweetheart that I am you come back from the dead. For I am Big George, the eternal winner.

Mr. Norris knew this hoard to be worth much less than the tall man believed, but as long he believed it, he'd stay honest. Thus ran Mr. Norris's theory, which was not only philosophical but also empirically scientific in the best sense.

23 He dreamed that a bomb was singing to him. From far away, the bomb was coming to marry him. The bomb was his destiny, falling on him, screaming.

...As a child he had gone out for Halloween as a mummy, a vampire, a blue-and-green-swolen drowned boy, all kinds of sufferings and mutilations and perversions represented by his costumes; and looking around him he saw witches and Frankenstein monsters and scarred warty masks of all the kids running around asking for candy in the dark; and he wondered: Why must we hurt ourselves and drive stakes through our hearts and drown ourselves in order to get candy? Why couldn't we just go out and ask for it?

But on Thursday only the committed regulars are there, and they do what they do on Thursday, delving into pagan rituals of worship to the amber gods that let you see to the lurching anger that spins you round and round at the center of things beyond lines and angles and the very floorboards become crazy under your feet so that the floor goes YAAAWW up again down again and suddenly tunk! it hits you on the forehead and your nose bleeds and you cling to it so that you don’t begin to slip down it and fetch up against the wall where you were dancing before with all the women in your life who have now vanished and left you alone here and the swaying candelabra are like careening galaxies burning into the back of your head; you don’t dare to roll over on your back and look straight into all those stars or you will be blinded; and from the cool floor and the smell of your own puke you gain more and more understanding of the universe.

For propaganda, of course. It’s all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?

So you cheat on your wife and you want me to give you a gold star for it, said Domino. Well, mister, I pity your wife and I don’t give a fuck about you. Now I’ve got to go outside for a minute and see a man about a dog. When I come back, if you want a flatback or a blow, you just lay down your money in my hand. But no more of your hypocritical bullshit. Who the hell do you think you are? You’re just a kid in the candy store that can’t decide which kind of liquorice he wants to stuff his face with. Now sit there and shut up.