Quotes from Cocaine

“Jealousy is a fever that arises from a stupid, baseless excitement in our unthinking brain.
Jealousy is a phenomenon of auto-suggestion.
The woman you love has gone to bed with X. You hate X, you hate her, and you have perpetually before your eyes the vision of your loved one and X embracing in an act that fills you with horror.
But you too in your time have deceived the woman you love and have done with Y what X did in bed with woman you love.
Well, what remains in your skin ,your mind of Mrs Y? Nothing whatever. No more than X left with your woman.
In other words, auto suggestion. Do you want evidence of that? Well, then, if you don't know the man, you imagine him to be hateful, offensive, repulsive, and you feel that if you met him you'd kill him.
But, if you happen to see his photograph, you begin to realize that it's possible to look at him without horror; and believe me, if you were actually introduced to him you'd approach him with a cordial smile on your lips, look him in the eye without trembling and, if you have reached my degree of perfection, you'd actually be capable of cheerfully patting him on the back and telling him he's a good chap.
In a not too distant future, reason and education will have driven home the lesson of the futility of jealousy.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“The alcoholic retains the ability to condemn his addiction and advise those not subject to it to avoid succumbing to the liquid poison. But the cocaine addict likes proselytizing; thus, instead of constituting a tangible warning, every victim of the drug acts as a source of infection.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“The height of perfection is mediocrity.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“The mob loves those who amuse and serve it. But to amuse it you have to love it. I love no one, least of all the mob, because the mob, the multitude, are like women: they betray those who love them.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“A man tells you the most interesting things he knows during the first half hour he talks to you; after that he either repeats himself or offers you variations of the same theme.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“I work because I need to have two thousand francs in my pocket every month, but I have no desire to glorify work either by enthusiasm or envy or emulation. Life is a mere waiting room in which we spend time before entering into the void. Who would think of working in a waiting room? While awaiting our turn we chat, we look at the pictures on the walls. But work? There is no point in it, if when our turn comes to go into the next room we shall no longer see anything.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“He was forty, which is the most frightening age in life. You don't feel sorry for the old, because they are old already; you don't feel sorry for the dead, because they are dead already. But you do feel sorry for those approaching old age, those approaching death. Forty! At fairgrounds you see roller coasters dashing up a steep slope followed by a steep drop and then another ascent. At the top of the slope, or rather just before the top, the vehicle has used up all the energy it acquired in the descent and it slows down and hesitates as if the top were unattainable, as it it were terrified of the approaching plunge. The man approaching forty is in a similar state of hesitation and uncertainty; his pace slackens, he is paralyzed by the approaching summit and the descent he cannot see but knows lies just ahead.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“Women are like posters. One is stuck on top of another and covers it completely. Perhaps just for a moment, when the paste is still soft and the paper still wet and slightly transparent, you may still catch a vague impression of the splashes of color of the first, but soon there's no more trace of it. Then, when the second one is removed, both come away together, leaving your memory and your heart as blank as a wall.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“We have to defend views we don't share and impose them on the public; deal with questions we don't understand and vulgarize them for the gallery. We can't have ideas of our own, we have to have those of the editor; and even the editor doesn't have the right to think with his own head, because when he's sent for by the board of directors he has to stifle his own views, if he has any, and support those of the shareholders.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“Conferences are assemblies of people who argue about how to conduct an argument and end by sending a telegram of congratulation to the minister.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“Nature [provides] with the excitement of the dance in the interest of the reproduction of the species.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“I've come to see that competitors are necessary to those who want to get on in the world. Opposition is indispensable to success.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“Mysticism was merely virility in a state of liquidation; sperm that had gone bad.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“What a jester God is, Tito went on. No doubt it was He who created such blessings as water to make the grass grow, grass to fill animals' bellies, animals to fill men's bellies, women for men to keep, the serpent to cause trouble to both sexes, truffles to slice and serve with lobsters, the sun to dry washing, the stars to shine on poets, and the moon so that Neapolitan songs could be written about it. But it strikes me as strange that things should have emerged from nothing at the mere sound of their names. I think the Almighty likes parlor tricks and arranged the whole thing beforehand, that like a good conjurer He had His boxes with double bottoms and His glasses prepared in advance, and that His bravura in seeming to create everything out of nothing in six days was a piece of American-style ballyhoo designed pour épater les bourgeois.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“No, I don't want to commit suicide, but I should like to fade away and die gently. To depart from life as one gets out of a bath.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“[T]he distance between sympathy and sensuality is as short as that which separates those two words in the dictionary.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“In a not too distant future, reason and education will have driven home the lesson of the futility of jealousy. The day will come when our beloved children (the cuckolds of the future) will be prepared to be cuckolded and will no longer suffer for it, because we shall have inoculated them with commonsense and given them anti-cuckoldry injections. Now”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“When I was twenty they told me to swear loyalty to the King, a person who acts in the capacity because his father and grandfather did the same before him. I took the oath because they forced my to, otherwise I wouldn't have done it. Then they sent me to kill people I didn't know who were dressed rather like I was. One day they said to me: "Look, there's one of your enemies, fire at him," and I fired, but missed. But he fired and wounded me. I don't know why they said it was a glorious wound.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“Not having a moustache, he was in the habit of twirling his eyebrows. “Why do you keep twirling your eyebrows?” a young lady asked him one day. “We all twirl the hairs we have, depending on our age and sex,” Tito replied. The young lady thought him very witty and fell in love with him. She”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“I met two or three men who were very kind to me. There was a magistrate who couldn't stand priests, and a priest who didn't have a good word to say for magistrates; and there was a landlord who let furnished rooms by the hour and spoke highly of both priests and magistrates, because both were his best clients.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

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Popular quotes

“Claire was just coming down the stairs, humming and thinking about how nice it was to have things getting back to normal, and how she'd tell Shane about the January thing tonight, when Myrnin sent a message through the portal.
Well, more of a rock with a note tied to it, which rolled across the floor and scared Eve into a scream before the portal snapped shut. Eve kicked the rock resentfully with her thick black boots and glared at it, then at the wall.
Claire gave her a "What the hell?" kind of look.
"Your boss," Eve said, and reached down to grab the rock, "needs to figure out texting. Seriously. Who does this? Is he actually from the Stone Age?”
― Rachel Caine, quote from Bite Club

“They laughed and put their arms around each other and kissed, first gently, then more passionately, and Harry pulled his face back a few inches and looked lovingly at Marion, I love you, and kissed her on the tip of her nose, her eyelids, her cheeks, then her soft lips, her chin, her neck, her ears, then nuzzled his face in her hair and caressed her back with his hands and breathed her name in her ear, Marion, Marion, I love you, and she gently moved with the flow and felt his words and kisses and feelings flow through her, easing away all her problems, her doubts, her fears, her anxieties and she felt warm and alive and vital. She felt loved. She felt necessary. Harry felt real and substantial. He could feel all the loose pieces starting to fall into place. He felt on the verge of something momentous. They felt whole. They felt united. Though they were still on the couch they felt a part of the vastness of the sky and the stars and moon. They were somehow on the crest of a hill with a gentle breeze blowing Marions hair flowingly; and walking through a sunlit woods and flower studded field feeling the freedom of the birds as they flew through the air chirping and singing and the night was comfortingly warm as the soft filtered light continued to push the darkness into the shadows as they held each other and kissed and pushed each others darkness into the corner, believing in each others light, each others dream.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., quote from Requiem for a Dream

“Madison looked from Jason, who jerked his head toward the gate, signaling her to get moving, to Longbranch, whose cold, direct gaze said Jason would pay in blood for any kind of double-cross.
One thing was clear: Jason Haley had been lying to her since the moment he set foot on her porch. Was he really plotting with the Roses? Or had he decided to sacrifice himself to get her into the sanctuary?
Madison threw her arms around Jason's neck as if she couldn't face being parted from him and whispered fiercely in his ear, "You lying lunatic bastard. They're going to kill you."
"I love you too," he murmured. "Go find Seph. Help him.”
― Cinda Williams Chima, quote from The Dragon Heir

“They're just kids. And their childhood has probably been as big a load of shit as his was. In a perfect world, he would have been one of them.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts

“There was no fast and painless way to perform an amputation, Tessia knew. Not if you did it properly.”
― Trudi Canavan, quote from The Magician's Apprentice

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BookQuoters 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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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