Quotes from The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“Yo! You’re my dope dealer not my thesis adviser. If I wanted your opinion about my dissertation, I’d have asked for it, Motherfucker!”
― Mark Leyner, quote from The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“Do it, my fellow Americans! Do it for every adolescent
anomic skank genius cloistered in his room, getting cranked,
rabidly humping his sampler as he confects some heretical,
monstrous persona for himself and dreams of an orgiastic,
blood-soaked apocalypse. Yes, the /impudence!/ We have
/nothing/ in this life of suffocating obligation but our
own motherfucking impudence! For God's sake, give us this
day our motherfucking big-dick impudence!!”
― Mark Leyner, quote from The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“We have nothing in this life of suffocating obligation but our motherfucking impudence!”
― Mark Leyner, quote from The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“Although we may deplore the film's scatological language, sexual explicitness and gratuitous gore as seemingly designed only to shock, in the manner of an angry, attention-craving child, we must remember that this movie was actually made by an angry, attention-craving child.”
― Mark Leyner, quote from The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“I guess I can picture things once they're done - I just can't picture actually doing them.”
― Mark Leyner, quote from The Tetherballs of Bougainville

About the author

Popular quotes

“It's never going to stop,’ Malenfant whispered. ‘It will consume the Solar System, the stars—’
This isn't some local phenomenon, Malenfant. This is a fundamental change in the structure of the universe. It will never stop. It will sweep on, growing at light speed, a runaway feedback fueled by the collapse of the vacuum itself. The Galaxy will be gone in a hundred thousand years, Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, in a couple of million years. It will take time, but eventually—
‘The future has gone,’ Malenfant said. ‘My God. That’s what this means, isn’t it? The downstream can’t happen now. All of it is gone. The colonization of the Galaxy; the settlement of the universe; the long, patient fight against entropy...’ That immense future had been cut off to die, like a tree chopped through at the root. ‘Why, Michael? Why have the children done this? Burned the house down, destroyed the future—’
Because it was the wrong future. Michael looked around the sky. He pointed to the lumpy, spreading edge of the unreality bubble.
There. Can you see that? It's already starting...
‘What is?’
The budding... The growth of the true vacuum region is not even. There will be pockets of the false vacuum—remnants of our universe—isolated by the spreading true vacuum. The fragments of false vacuum will collapse. Like—
‘Like black holes.’ And in that instant, Malenfant understood. ‘That’s what this is for. This is just a better way of making black holes, and budding off new universes. Better than stars, even.’
Much better. The black holes created as the vacuum decay proceeds will overwhelm by many orders of magnitude the mere billion billion that our universe might have created through its stars and galaxy cores.
‘And the long, slow evolution of the universes, the branching tree of cosmoses?...’
We have changed everything, Malenfant. Mind has assumed responsibility for the evolution of the cosmos. There will be many daughter universes—universes too many to count, universes exotic beyond our imagining—and many, many of them will harbor life and mind.
‘But we were the first.’
Now he understood. This was the purpose. Not the long survival of humankind into a dismal future of decay and shadows, the final retreat into the lossless substrate, where nothing ever changed or grew. The purpose of humankind—the first intelligence of all—had been to reshape the universe in order to bud others and create a storm of mind. We got it wrong, he thought. By striving for a meaningless eternity, humans denied true infinity. But we reached back, back in time, back to the far upstream, and spoke to our last children—the maligned Blues—and we put it right. This is what it meant to be alone in the universe, to be the first. We had all of infinite time and space in our hands. We had ultimate responsibility. And we discharged it. We were parents of the universe, not its children.”
― Stephen Baxter, quote from Manifold: Time

“So, what you're saying is that I bring out your book - wielding, short tempered side?" He hooked his foot through the straps of my backpack and brought in front of him. "Removing temptation."
I gave him a look that communicated he should wither and die.”
― Lani Woodland, quote from Intrinsical

“This letter really touched my heart. Sabrina says when she lost all her hair during chemo, she wore the cap I gave her.”
― Justin Bieber, quote from First Step 2 Forever

“There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walking

“Whatcha doing, Lieu?" she asked cautiously. "Praying," he muttered. "I suck at it."
"Your doing it wrong," she said flatly. "I'm not big on church, but I'm pretty sure you're supposed to do it with a friend.”
― Amy Lane, quote from Keeping Promise Rock

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters 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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.