“Look how black the sky is, the writer said. I made it that way.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine? But isn't that what people do?”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“You learn to move on without the people you love.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how you've always lived.)”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“When we sat down to eat I took inventory of the people in the room, and the remnants of my good mood evaporated when I realized how very little I had in common with them – the career dads, the responsible and diligent moms – and I was soon filled with dread and loneliness. I locked in on the smug feeling of superiority that married couples give off and that permeated the air – the shared assumptions, the sweet and contented apathy, it all lingered everywhere – despite the absence in the room of anyone single at which to aim this.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“As a writer you slant all evidence in favor of the conclusions you want to produce and you rarely tilt in favor of the truth. ...This is what a writer does: his life is a maelstrom of lying. Embellishment is his focal point. This is what we do to please others. This is what we do in order to flee ourselves. A writer's physical life is basically one of stasis, and to combat this constraint, an opposite world and another self have to be constructed daily. ...the half world of a writer's life encourages pain and drama, and defeat is good for art: if it was day we made it night, if it was love we made it hate, serenity becomes chaos, kindness became viciousness, God became the devil, a daugher became a whore. I had been inordinately rewarded for participating in this process, and lying often leaked from my writing life--an enclosed sphere of consciousness, a place suspended outside of time, where the untruths flowed onto the whiteness of a blank screen--into the part of me that was tactile and alive.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine?"
(But isn't that what people do?)”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“I needed something--the distraction of another life--to alleviate fear.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“The heroin flowing through me, I thought about the last time I saw my father alive. He was drunk and overweight in a restaurant in Beverly Hills, and curling into myself on the bed I thought: What if I had done something that day? I had just sat passively in a restaurant booth as the midday light filled the half-empty dining room, pondering a decision. The decision was: should you disarm him? That was the word I remember: disarm. Should you tell him something that might not be the truth but would get the desired reaction? And what was I going to convince him of, even though it was a lie? Did it matter? Whatever it was, it would constitute a new beginning. The immediate line: You’re my father and I love you. I remember staring at the white tablecloth as I contemplated saying this. Could I actually do it? I didn’t believe it, and it wasn’t true, but I wanted it to be. For one moment, as my father ordered another vodka (it was two in the afternoon; this was his fourth) and started ranting about my mother and the slump in California real estate and how “your sisters” never called him, I realized it could actually happen, and that by saying this I would save him. I suddenly saw a future with my father. But the check came along with the drink and I was knocked out of my reverie by an argument he wanted to start and I simply stood up and walked away from the booth without looking back at him or saying goodbye and then I was standing in sunlight. Loosening my tie as a parking valet pulled up to the curb in the cream-colored 450 SL. I half smiled at the memory, for thinking that I could just let go of the damage that a father can do to a son. I never spoke to him again.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“I had dreamed of something so different from what reality was now offering up, but that dream had been a blind man's vision. That dream was a miracle. The morning was fading. And I remembered yet again that I was a tourist here.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“The reassuring smile was now useless. I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information--these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything together yet, so the mind built up a defense, and the evidence was restructured, and that was what I tried to do on that morning--to restructure the evidence so it made sense--and that is what I failed at.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“There was something beneath the surface of things.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“Haven't we outgrown all this tired irony? Weren't we supposed to give up acting twenty-two forever?”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“Todo el mundo tiene meido. Pero si nos mantenemos unidos, si intentamos estar disponibles para los otros, ya no tendremos miedo.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“This was sending me out so much further than I had ever expected: a place beyond strength.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“The polite conversation that carried over from cocktails into dinner was so stifling that it carried a certain ruthlessness,”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“It was always the A booth. It was always the front seat of the roller coaster. It was never “Let’s not get the bottle of Cristal.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“En cuanto me di cuenta de que estaba completamente solo comprendí, sólo entonces, que tenía problemas graves. Mi actitud nostálgica con respecto a la fama y las drogas -el placer de comadecerme a mí mismo- se había transformado en tristeza y el futuro ya no me parecía ni remotamente plausible. Solamente una cosa parecía correr hacia mí: una negrura, una tumba, el final”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
“Cualquiera que fuera el interés que compartían se evaporó tan rápido que pareció no haber existido en absoluto. Robby se nos acercó penosamente bajo el destello de las luces del centro comercial y de pronto me preocupó que su vida tuviera tan poco de poesía o romanticismo. Todo giraba en torno a una cotidianidad ansiosa y aburrida. Todo era una representación”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from Lunar Park
Bret Easton Ellis
Born place: in Los Angeles, California, The United States
Born date March 7, 1964
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― J.J. McAvoy, quote from Ruthless People
“There's this sloth in the jungle walking from one tree to another, and it's mugged by a gang of snails, and when the police ask the sloth if it could identify any of its attackers, it says, 'I don't know; it all happened so quickly...”
― Iain Banks, quote from Espedair Street
“The cicadas, as if they were wired on the same circuit, suddenly filled the garden with a loud burst of celebration.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“Some things can be recovered. Some things can be restored. But some lost things, we seek forever.”
― Margaret George, quote from Helen of Troy
“And you’re beautiful. You’d have to work pretty hard to mess that up.”
― Jennifer Echols, quote from Endless Summer
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The DiabolicBookQuoters 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.
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