Quotes from Crooked Little Vein

Warren Ellis ·  288 pages

Rating: (8.4K votes)


“He'd always liked women who'd talk back to him just a little bit. "Girls with balls" were good. Women with an actual mind of their own who could prove him wrong in something were, of course, castrating bitches who should be drowned in bottomless wells.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“Shopping for clothes is a Boyfriend Thing. You stand around and look blankly at a bunch of pieces of fabric and you look at the price tags and you wonder how something that'd barely cover your right nut can cost the price of a kidney and you watch the shop assistants check you out and wonder what you're doing with her because she's cute and you're kind of funny-looking and she tries clothes on and you look at her ass in a dozen different items that all look exactly the same and let's face it you're just looking at her ass anyway and it all blurs together and then someone sticks a vacuum cleaner in your wallet and vacuums out all the cash and you leave the store with one bag so small that mice couldn't fuck in it. Repeat a dozen times or until the front of your brain dies.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“When I got the tattoo, I knew I was drawing a crooked line between myself and society.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“He was in blue jeans and a work shirt, which is another weird quirk of Rich Old Men. Just one of the guys here. Blue jeans and a work shirt, salt of the earth, working man like yourself. Like they're somehow uncomfortable about being rich enough to sleep in a bed made of vaginas being pulled around the town at night by a fleet of gold-covered midgets.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“You think that drinking with a serial killer takes you into the midnight currents of the culture? I say bullshit. There's been twelve TV documentaries, three movies and eight books about me. I'm more popular than any of these designed-by-pedophile pop moppets littering the music television and the gossip columns. I've killed more people than Paris Hilton has desemenated, I was famous before she was here and I'll be famous after she's gone. I am the mainstream. I am, in fact, the only true rock star of the modern age. Every newspaper in America never fails to report on my comeback tours, and I get excellent reviews.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein



“The two most dangerous things in the world are rich people and crazy people. The Roanokes are rich like pharoahs and crazier'n a snake-fucking baby.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“All the time, I was telling myself, just enjoy it for what it is, don’t be weird, don’t get all screwed up over something it isn’t. The usual mantra when you’re with someone who you’re not really with and desperately want to be.
Have you noticed how telling yourself all that shit never actually helps?”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“I wish I still had that photo.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“You know what it's like, finding eight middle-aged guys having tantric sex with ostriches?”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“Some asshole scraped the 'I' out of INVESTIGATOR with their keys six months ago. I simply can’t be bothered to fix that one. For all the work I get, I may as well be an 'invest gator”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein



“Gentrification had stopped dead several doors west of my spot overlooking Avenue B. You could actually see the line. That side of the line; Biafran cuisine, sparkling plastic secure window units, women called Imogen and Saffron, men called Josh and Morgan. My side of the line; crack whores, burned-out cars, bullets stuck in door frames, and men called Father-Eating Bastard. It’s almost a point of honour to live near a crackhouse, like living in a pre-Rudy Zone, a piece of Old New York.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“Straight people are so fucking weird.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“At the departure gate, a drunken airport security woman was handing out box cutters to the passengers.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“This is the mainstream now, Mike. This is how life in America is. Moment by moment, our country has grown sicker. Our borders, Mike, have come to encompass the nine circles of Hell.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“I stood there alone in the eerily silent streets of Las Vegas and listened to my penis cry.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein



“I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug. It was a huge brown bastard; had a body like a turd with legs and beady black eyes full of secret rat knowledge.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“[. . .] a super-rat. I nailed it across the eyes once with a lucky shot with the butt of my gun, but it got up again and shat in my telephone.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“Bukkake,” said a voice in my ear. “Multiple ejaculations onto the face. It’s the new thing.” It was the tattooed girl, crouched behind my chair. “This is the only genuine and authentic Godzilla Bukkake night in America.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do something really goddamn stupid.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“I don’t want to kill her. But then I don’t want to shit and eat. But in the order to live I have to do it.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein



“Fuck America and get rich like astronauts.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


“I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug. It”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Crooked Little Vein


About the author

Warren Ellis
Born place: in The United Kingdom
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Popular quotes

“Dunque," chiese, "tu non apprezzi proprio la fedeltà? La fedeltà alle proprie memorie?"
"Io credo che solo il presente abbia importanza, non il passato. Lasciamolo perdere il passato. Se cerchiamo di mantenerlo in vita, lo alteriamo, lo vediamo in una prospettiva sbagliata...esageriamo sempre."
"Ma io ricordo a perfezione ogni parola e ogni incidente di quei giorni!" esclamò David con passione.
"E non dovresti, caro: perché così rivivi quei giorni col sentimento di un ragazzo, mentre dovresti giudicarli con l'equilibrio e la maturità di un uomo."
"E che importa?"
Hilda esitò. Si rendeva conto che non era saggio proseguire, eppure desiderava troppo dire certe cose.
"Ecco...io credo che tu continui a veder tuo padre come un...mostro. Ne fai una specie di personificazione del male...Probabilmente invece, se lo vedessi oggi, ti renderesti conto che è un uomo qualunque, un uomo forse dominato dalle passioni, non esente da biasimo, ma sempre e soltanto un uomo, non una specie di mostro inumano."
"Non capisci...Il modo in cui ha trattato mia madre..."
"Vi è una certa forma di dolcezza, di sottomissione," disse Hilda gravemente, "che stimola i peggiori istinti di un uomo, mentre lo stesso uomo affrontato con spirito deciso diventerebbe una creatura tutta diversa."
"Dunque, secondo te, è colpa della mamma..."
"No, no," lo interruppe Hilda. "Sono certa che tuo padre deve averla trattata molto male, ma...ma il matrimonio è una cosa specialissima e non credo che un estraneo - sia pure un figlio - abbia il diritto di giudicare tra i coniugi. Comunque, il tuo risentimento attuale non può più aiutare in nulla tua madre...Tutto è finito, ormai: non rimane che un vecchio malandato in salute che desidera rivedere suo figlio per Natale."
"E tu vuoi che io vada?"
Ancora una volta Hilda esitò. Poi si decise.
"Sì," disse. "Desidero che tu vada, e la faccia finita una volta per tutte.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Hercule Poirot's Christmas


“A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap. There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night-watch is mustered. There is one less to take the wheel, and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.”
― Richard Henry Dana Jr., quote from Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor's Life at Sea


“English should not stoop to embrace the lowest common denominator. Rather, society should step up and grant the language the respect it deserves.”
― Terry Fallis, quote from The Best Laid Plans


“What is the shocking weakness in virtually every man you know well? The whimpering like children when they're ill. The need for women to ask directions for them. Help shop for their clothes. Book appointments for their hair to be cut because they don't care to speak for themselves. The inability to pick up a phone if they want a relationship to stop. Are the weaknesses you see again and again a symptom of men in this age, or have they always been there, and women, secretly, have always known?”
― Nikki Gemmell, quote from The Bride Stripped Bare


“Karl Marx, Amaya liked to say, was the last great philosopher of the coal age; his workers were locked into a serflike condition. Had Marx witnessed the industrial explosion of the Oil Century and the rising standard of living it produced among ordinary workers, he might have written differently.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties


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