Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife

I always think everything is going to last forever, but nothing ever does. In fact nothing exists longer than an instant except the thing that we hold in memory

Unrequited love is bad, but unrequitable love can really get you down.

I had learned from my reading that you can do really awful things when you are bored, things that are bound to make you miserable. In fact, you do them in order to become miserable, so you won't have to be bored anymore.

Sometimes the books were arranged under signs, but sometimes they were just anywhere and everywhere. After I understood people better, I realized that this incredible disorder was one of the things that they loved about Pembroke Books. They did not come there just to buy a book, plunk down some cash and scram. They hung around. They called it browsing, but it was more like excavation or mining. I was surprised they didn't come in with shovels. They dug for treasures with bare hands, up to their armpits sometimes, and when they hauled some literary nugget from a mound of dross, they were much happier than if they had just walked in and bought it. In that way, shopping at Pembroke was like reading: you never knew what you might encounter on the next page -- the next shelf, stack, or box --and that was part of the pleasure of it.

It is practically an axiom in psychiatry that precocious intellect combined with physical weakness can give rise to many unpleasant character traits - avarice, delusions of grandeur , and obsessive masturbation, to name just a few.

Lives in stories have direction and meaning. Even stupid, meaningless lives, like Lenny's in "Of Mice and Men," Acquire through their places in a story at least the dignity and meaning of being Stupid, Meaningless Lives, the consolation of being exemplars of something. In real life you do not get even that.

I stared at the words and they did not swim or blur. Rats have no tears. Dry and cold was the world and beautiful the words. Words of good-bye and farewell, farewell and so long, from the little one and the Big One. I folded the passage up again and I ate it.

Rata que debería estar muerta y no está muerta. Débil y sucia, pero no muerta, nada muerta, ahí estaba yo, vivo, debajo de un arbusto; y tenía un plan.

Malo es el amor no correspondido; pero lo que verdaderamente puede hundirlo a uno es el amor no correspondible.

Quien no siente el deseo de volver a vivir la vida es porque la ha desperdiciado.

Si hay algo para lo que resulte útil una formación literaria, es para dotarlo a uno de un sentido de la catástrofe. No hay nada como una imaginación vivida para desvitalizarle a uno el valor.

La diferencia entre ponerse una máscara, que siempre es ocasión de libertad, y que le obliguen a uno a ponérsela, es la misma que hay entre refugio y cárcel.