Transmetropolitan, Vol. 5: Lonely City
Quotes from the Book
Nature always wins. It has never lost, and I pray it never will.
70
When you are with women, you are alone.When you are with homosexuals, you are alone.When you are with men far oustide your socioeconomic class, you are alone. You will, for a majority of your life, be alone. Some people are lucky enough to find like-minded men of similar status.Those are the men that you stand by for life.
63
All this "honest work" kills beauty in man too. It forces men into poor diet, poor choices, poor paths outside the workplace. Everything in life for them, whether they chose so or not, must revolve around their "honest work". No time to research, pick, and cook a proper meal so I have chips and soda again. No time to work out, to worship the sun in peace, to study so I watch television and jerk off in-between beers again. No time to even so much as consider another way of life so I hammer nails into useless thing for useless people in useless place again. You are being scammed, robbed.
44
You will never get to see fifty foot statues of warlords and emperors or feel the triumph of conquest. You will never see man live as the ancients dreamed he would, all because a couple of rats tunneled their way into positions of power. They said the past is wrong. They said invaders should have your land. They said its ok to embrace apathy. You are a victim of the technocracy, of an abuse named 'civility'. You have been robbed of a fulfilling earnest life.
34
There's a concert tonight and the few friends I've got here have invited me to come out. They aren't my real friends though, mostly because I can't be racist, sexist, or myself around them
25
Quit your job and shoot a politician.
21
Nihilism and irony are really neat until you're dead and the only person who remembers you is your weed dealer. Nothing but a body, only found because it hadn't resupplied on drugs in a while.
17
We can have Rome again, if you break enough BMW windows.
17
Getting my shit kicked in by a clan of Jewish boarding school kids for referring to the Torah as "The Elder Scroll".
17
At the end of it all, in those darkest of day, smiles man atop the mountain debris. He can see the many stars, smell the coming wind, only now does he know that he's free.
15
Did you know the CIA put anime into black communities nationwide? Undoubtedly their largest psychological operation to date, followed by the introduction of crack-cocaine and World Star Hip Hop.
12
In this moment, the noblest trade is mastering the art of leisure.
10
Should I start doing steroids? I want to get stronger so I can beat my girlfriend. Not that I couldn’t already, I just want to beat the shit out of her even harder.
9
Behind everything I've said, every sin I've committed, every woman I've wronged, was absolute sincerity.
8
I don’t care if I’m pretentious. Everything is pretentious when everyone is a nihilist. Everything is pretentious on the downwards pointed Earth. Everyone is all rotting and talk. There’s no purity left to us here because the apathetic tailspinners have consolidated life into one big joke. Sincerity is dead or laughed at.
7
It's a sin to drown yourself in work forever, unless of course that work produces things of greatness.
7
To the hyper-judgmental gay community, I say this: don't throw stones when you live in glass houses, everyone can see you barebacking strangers from the internet. You also have bad taste. Glass walls? Time to execute your decorator. And yourself.
6
Everyone watches television and decides they'll roleplay their favorite sociopath or their favorite mental invalid. Many of the people around today aspire to be deranged or something, it's embarrassing. It's like they want an escape from the mundane so badly that they'd induce (or act out) mental instability to get there.
6
Your credit score is unimportant, similar to the number of dates you are supposed to go on before dropping the n-word.
6
When you think about an artist, someone who truly understands touching aestheticism, your brain should envision a physically fit and well-read male with beliefs that don't deteriorate the culture he creates. The artist wakes up and aches to understand the world surrounding. He aches to absorb its everything. Absorb the sun, the air, the water. He holds inside him everything he's ever seen. He feeds on beauty to make new beauty. His work never disrupts the order of nature — only adds to it, compliments it. The people of his time are blessed to have lived alongside him. They thank him for making the world more beautiful than it was yesterday. An artist, true artist, makes the Heavens smile, for he himself is Heaven sent.
5
We missed the time when a lonely traveler looked up at the moon and had absolutely no idea what it was. Sure, he could look through a telescope and better see the surface, but he'd never get rid of that overwhelming never knowing.
3
SECOND WARNING If you came here expecting coherent plot or structure, you bought or stole the wrong book. Hopefully whoever edits this can clean it up a little bit. In reality, do you even care?
3
The enemies of today are contagiously weak; their communion is a dangerous trading of hard-to-cure poisons.
2
what's in a name? That which we call a woman by any other name would still cause problems.
2
In the grand scheme of things, we are all victims. Soy, antinutrients, plaque, and viscous chemicals run ample in our blood. It manipulates the very code that makes us, us. We are being weakened, made docile for whoever yells the orders next. Nothing is truly safe to eat anymore unless you exile yourself to a forest and physically choose and kill what enters your stomach — or know someone who does that. When it comes to modern food, there is only really bad and sort of bad.
1
I am at the concert and I am smirking in the corner, ignoring what my peers are discussing. Let us picture something good. I'm wearing a level-two bulletproof vest under my Ralph Lauren vintage flannel, and already it's almost entirely concealed. Makes me look slightly more built, nobody's complaining. It also protects against nine millimeter and forty caliber rounds, the only kinds police use anymore. I think. Over that, a Swiss military jacket littered with pockets, all of which I custom fit to hold the six magazines accompanying my short barrel rifle. It's a gun small enough to fit perfectly along my back while still under my coat. In the pockets of my Levi five-elevens - a switchblade and one smoke grenade, reserved for either my entrance or exit. I still haven't decided. In my waistband is a... ... and then two squad cars skid to a halt outside. I see them before they see me, as the front windows are tinted in my favor. With a fresh magazine, I am and shoot at - "HEY!" Someone shouting playfully in my face has yanked me back into the concert hall
1
I'm not usually like this. I'm not usually so on edge, so forthright. I'm not usually exhaling death pheromones into the common man's air. I'm not usually foaming at the mouth. But today, I feel the blood flowing with a little more ease. I've felt like this for a while now. Weeks maybe. Months possibly. I believe that my brain is getting more oxygen than normal. Perhaps it's my increase in both raw meat & garlic consumption.
1
It's today you have accepted that you, yourself, are an engine of chaos, an accelerationist. You architect harassment.
WARNING I preface this all with a reminder that none of what you're about to read reflects upon the author himself. The following is purely fiction.
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About Mike Ma
About the book
“At a glance, Mike comes off like a 1980s teen movie bully on downers.” - Playboy Magazine“…Mike Ma bragged about crashing a White House press conference.” - The Huffington Post. Now, you can read his long-awaited first book. Harassment Architecture has been described as an almost plotless and violent march against what the author calls the "lowerworld". It's the story of a man, sick on his surrounds, bound by them, but still seeking the way out.
Keep reading
Transmetropolitan, Vol. 5: Lonely City
A Man Without a Country
When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
The Coldest Winter Ever
A Naked Singularity
Sandman Slim
The Golden Notebook
Infinite Jest
My Booky Wook
Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits
Brain Droppings
Money
Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems
This Book Is Full of Spiders
The Gum Thief
Tropic of Cancer
The Intern's Handbook
You're Making Me Hate You: A Cantankerous Look at the Common Misconception That Humans Have Any Common Sense Left
The Gone-Away World
The Library of the Dead
Filth
Tales of Ordinary Madness
Demonspawn
Stranger in a Strange Land
Watchmen
Cosmopolis
The Burning World
Antkind
Broken Angels
Thirteen
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
V for Vendetta
Villa Incognito
King Dork
Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations
The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
Bleeding Edge
Zoo City
Cocaine
Blood Rites
Prince of Thorns
A Long Way Down
Hitch-22: A Memoir
Altered Carbon
Skinny Legs and All
Rosewater
Old Man's War
The Imperfectionists
Timequake
Ghostwritten
Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
The Shining Girls
Blackfish City
I, Lucifer
Super Sad True Love Story
Kill the Dead
She Who Waits
By Nightfall

