“There was something about clowns that was worse than zombies. (Or maybe something that was the same. When you see a zombie, you want to laugh at first. When you see a clown, most people get a little nervous. There's the pallor and the cakey mortician-style makeup, the shuffling and the untidy hair. But clowns were probably malicious, and they moved fast on those little bicycles and in those little crammed cars. Zombies weren't much of anything. They didn't carry musical instruments and they didn't care whether or not you laughed at them. You always knew what zombies wanted.)”
― John Joseph Adams, quote from The Living Dead
“Dying hurts," said Ari. "It won't make you happy. It won't make anybody happy.”
― John Joseph Adams, quote from The Living Dead
“Everyone always seems happier than Soap, and as if they know something that Soap doesn't.”
― John Joseph Adams, quote from The Living Dead
“History happens while you're making other plans,”
― John Joseph Adams, quote from The Living Dead
“The universe has no opinion of us. No matter how much we want to pretend, real life does not contain the quality of story. No arcs, no morals, no meaning. Life is what we make of it.”
― John Joseph Adams, quote from The Living Dead
“scratch the surface and we were all going nuts in a thousand quiet ways.”
― John Joseph Adams, quote from The Living Dead
“Copernicus formulated the heliocentric model of the solar system in the mid-1500s, but the Church didn't get around to punishing anyone for it until they threw Galileo in jail nearly a hundred years later.”
― John Joseph Adams, quote from The Living Dead
“Some people thought of vampires as rock stars, but really they were more like Martha Stewart. Vampires were prissy. They had to follow rules. They had to look good.”
― John Joseph Adams, quote from The Living Dead
“quoting Pope. " 'Words are like leaves, where they most abound, beneath, little fruit or sense is found.”
― John Joseph Adams, quote from The Living Dead
“I have been conditioned by Philip Morris," he said with a smile.”
― John Joseph Adams, quote from The Living Dead
John Joseph Adams
Born place: in The United States
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“You always believed we could survive in the outside world. I'm doing everything I can to give at least some of us a chance of not only surviving but truly living.”
― Anne Bishop, quote from Marked in Flesh
“How can I be secure? (Pause.) Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what’s beyond measure? That’s a sickness. That’s a trap. There is no measure. Only greed.”
― David Mamet, quote from Glengarry Glen Ross
“La route quelquefois s'agrémente de fables, comme le sommeil s'agrémente de songes, il faut savoir ouvrir les yeux à l'arrivée.”
― Amin Maalouf, quote from Balthasar's Odyssey
“Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes
First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.
And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.
Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer’s dividing water,
and slip inside.
You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.
The complexity of women’s undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.
Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything—
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.
What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.
So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset
and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that Reason is a plank,
that Life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Picnic, Lightning
“We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don't want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don't want to fuck while pretending he's the one you do. That's called fidelity. That's called monogamy. That's called civilization and its discontents.”
― Erica Jong, quote from Fear of Flying
Northern Lights
Destination Anywhere
The Death and Life o...
Children of Time
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