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

“The implants just give you a new set of reproductive-free imperatives, that's all. The rest, thank the gods, is up to you. They wouldn't be worth anything if they didn't give rise to the most troubling and complex problems of the heart. They are what makes all this glory, this madness worthwhile. We are born to the trouble as sparks fly upwards, that is what is great about us, man, woman, transgen, nute.”
― Ian McDonald, quote from River of Gods

“WHORES.
Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“Well, that's pretty much what the schools are like, I think: they reward discipline and obedience, and they punish independence of mind. If you happen to be a little innovative, or maybe you forgot to come to school one day because you were reading a book or something, that's a tragedy, that's a crime―because you're not supposed to think, you're supposed to obey, and just proceed through the material in whatever way they require.
And in fact, most of the people who make it through the education system and get into the elite universities are able to do it because they've been willing to obey a lot of stupid orders for years and years―that's the way I did it, for example. Like, you're told by some stupid teacher, "Do this," which you know makes no sense whatsoever, but you do it, and if you do it you get to the next rung, and then you obey the next order, and finally you work your way through and they give you your letters: an awful lot of education is like that, from the very beginning. Some people go along with it because they figure, "Okay, I'll do any stupid thing that asshole says because I want to get ahead"; others do it because they've just internalized the values―but after a while, those two things tend to get sort of blurred. But you do it, or else you're out: you ask too many questions and you're going to get in trouble.
Now, there are also people who don't go along-and they're called "behavior problems," or "unmotivated," or things like that. Well, you don't want to be too glib about it―there are children with behavior problems but a lot of them are just independent-minded, or don't like to conform, or just want to go their own way. And they get into trouble right from the very beginning, and are typically weeded out. I mean, I've taught young kids too, and the fact is there are always some who just don't take your word for it. And the very unfortunate tendency is to try to beat them down, because they're a pain in the neck. But what they ought to be is encouraged. Yeah: why take my word for it? Who the heck am I? Figure it out for yourself. That's what real education would be about, in fact.”
― Noam Chomsky, quote from Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

“I was able to come home to my family that didn’t give a shit who I would grow up loving. I was able to have my dad teach me how to fight back, and not because he thought his son was a pansy, but because his son was a pansy who wanted to fight back. I was able to come home and sit on a chair while my mother kneeled before me, wiping the blood from a cut on my forehead where Donnie Craig’s fist had hit me. I got to see the anger in their eyes, but it was never directed toward me. It was directed at everyone who thought they could hurt me. It was directed at anyone who thought I was something less than what I was. My parents never made me feel like I was something I wasn’t. They never tried to change me or break me down. They”
― T.J. Klune, quote from Tell Me It's Real

“What happened?”

Bria shrugged. “I waited until I was sure there was no one else around who could get hurt, then threw my coffee in the bastard’s face and took away his gun. While he was screaming from the pain and the second-degree burns, I cuffed his ass and hauled him down to the station. End of story.”

Fin gave my sister a warm, admiring look. “Nice takedown, detective. Even if you should have found another way to do it. Don’t you know that you never, ever waste a cup of coffee like that?”
― Jennifer Estep, quote from Spider’s Revenge

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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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