“To live with angels and chase their dreams.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“They had dreams but they called them dreams because they were unrelated to reality, they were a distant unknown, an impossibility, they would never come true.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“He smiles, even though he knows it will never be like that again, even though he knows the world no longer wants what he has, what he loves, what he has devoted his life to building and maintaining. He lies in bed and stares at the photo and smiles. His brain says let it go, sell it. His heart says no. His sense of reason and his brain tell him to do it. His heart says no. Whenever he allows himself to hear it, his heart says no, no, no. All day long, everyday, his heart screams no. (…) he lies in bed and stares at the photo and smiles. His brain says let it go, sell it. His heart says no.
His heart says no.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“He pulled out turned west and started driving towards the glow it was thousands of miles away, he started driving towards the glow.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“But all good things come to an end, often a sad angry miserable end. The cause for such an end can usually be whittled down to one of three things: money, sickness, love lost.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“Joe asks how long they've been there one of them says fuck off another says a week a third calls him a drunk homeless fuck and tells him to go away. Joe asks how long they will wait the singular answer is as long as it takes and somewhere inside the house five-day-old children sleep under siege because their mother has a nice smile and beautiful hair and can recite lines on camera.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“Every year, at 8:00 PM on the second Saturday of July, hundreds of people gather along a section of Los Angeles rail track to drop their pants and moon passing passenger trains.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“A contest was held in 1994 to rename the Los Angeles Convention and Exhibition Center after an extensive renovation and expansion. The winning name, chosen from over ten thousand entries, was the Los Angeles Convention Center.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board is established in 1946 in an effort to discover the cause of the brown cloud hanging over the city and decide how to combat and disperse it. In 1949, after intense lobbying from both the automobile and oil industries, and against the recommendations and position of the Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board, the public rail system, which at one time was the largest in the world, and still serves a majority of the city's population, is decommissioned and torn out. It is replaced by a small fleet of buses.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“In 1970, a superior Court judge issues an order forcing the desegregation of Los Angeles schools. The judge survives an assassination attempt and loses his job in the next election.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“1954. Smog prevents airplanes from landing and ships from docking for three days.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“We fell in love. We pursued that love sexually and emotionally. I don't think he's as comfortable or as open with his sexuality as I am with mine, so he ended the relationship. It was a beautiful thing, like the most perfect healthy colorful blooming flower, while it lasted, it was like a flower from heaven. Now it's like a bomb went off in my heart. I'll probably never be the same.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“That's how life works. You know it when you know it.
They're nineteen and in love. Alone except for each other. Jobless and homeless, looking for something, somewhere, anywhere here.
They're on a sixteen-line highway.
Driving west.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“he sits and waits and hopes that at some”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“A small portion of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes are enshrined at the Self Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine Temple in Pacific Palisades. They are the only portion of Gandhi’s remains that are kept anywhere outside of India.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“They live in cardbox encampments, tin shacks, they live in tents and sleeping bags, they live on the ground. They yell at each other, scream at each other, sleep with each other, do drugs and drink with each other, fuck each other, kill each other. They”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“The sun rises in a clear sky that moves from black to gray to white to deep, pure crystal blue. One in Georgia packs his things he’s going to take a bus. Four in Mexico walk across scorched earth water in packs on their back. Two in Indiana best friends coming together they pack their best clothes while their parents wait to take them to the airport. One in Canada drives south. Sixty from China in a cargo container sail east. Four in New York pool their cash and buy a car and drop out of school and drive west. Sixteen cars of a passenger train crossing the Mojave only one stop left. One in Miami doesn’t know how she’s going to get there. Three in Montana have a truck none of them have any idea what they’re going to do once they arrive. A plane from Brazil sold out landing at LAX. Six in Chicago dreaming on shared stages they rented a van they’ll see if any of them can make it. Two from Arizona hitchhiking. Four more just crossed in Texas walking. Another one in Ohio with a motorcycle and a dream. All of them with their dreams. It calls to them and they believe it and they cannot say no to it, they cannot say no. It calls to them. It calls. Calls.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“You want worship for what? For what you give? For how you treat us? For what you allow to happen? For the hatred that exists that you don’t stop? For the violence that you don’t stop? For the death that you don’t stop? Man killing man killing women killing children that you don’t stop. And you want worship? You want us on our knees? You want devotion? You want exaltation? You want faith? A crown of thorns pressed into the skull bleeding at the tips.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“In 1918, a Chinese immigrant working in a Los Angeles noodle factory invented the fortune cookie. He did so believing that a cookie with a positive message in it would raise the spirits of the city’s poor.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“In 1935, the Los Angeles Police Department, via mayoral directive, sends a battalion of police officers to the Nevada border to stop hitchhikers, primarily Mexican nationals, from entering the state of California. They return after four days and report that they were unable to stem the flow of immigration.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“Twenty-nine cents of every tax dollar collected is spent on law enforcement. Fifteen cents of every tax dollar collected is spent on sewage collection and treatment. Eight cents of every tax dollar collected is spent on road maintenance. One-point-five cents of every tax dollar collected is spent on education.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
“In 2001, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-arc), an avant-garde architecture school that has produced some of the prominent architects in the country, relocated to the Artists District”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
James Frey
Born place: in Cleveland, Ohio, The United States
Born date September 12, 1969
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“The intense thereness of it-haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs-I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That's why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this? Now, remembering Sax's odd word and his odd religion, John finally understood him; because he was feeling the thisness of the moment like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to this moment.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, quote from Red Mars
“Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed—he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness?”
― Erich Fromm, quote from Escape from Freedom
“Sometimes hope is the most powerful medicine of all.”
― K. Bromberg, quote from Crashed
“He was angry; not as the irritable, from chafing of a trifle; nor was his anger like the fool's, pumped from the wells of nothing, to be dissipated by a reproach or a curse; it was the wrath peculiar to ardent natures rudely awakened by the sudden annihilation of a hope --dream, if you will-- in which the choicest happinesses were thought to be certainly in reach. In such case nothing intermediate will carry off the passion --the quarrel is with Fate.”
― Lew Wallace, quote from Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
“The sky was the colour of sad weddings.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y
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HumanityBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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