Been Quotes (page 125)
JACKThat is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won't want to know Bunbury. ALGERNONThen your wife will. You don't seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none. JACKThat, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years. ALGERNONYes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time.
Oscar Wilde
There was a game she had played with Sophie in the long hallways of Edgewood, where she and Sophie would stand as far apart as was possible to get and still see eachother. Then they would walk slowly and deliberately, looking always each at the other's face. They kept on, at the same pace, not laughing or trying not to, till their noses touched. It was like this with Smokey, though he had started from far off, too far to be seen, coming from the City? no farther, out there where she had...
John Crowley
Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the face of the earth than any political war ever will. Return to the nothingness from which the mad hope and ridiculous fright of men dared call you forth to their misfortune. You only appeared as a torment for the human race. What crimes would have been spared the world, if they had choked the first imbecile who thought of speaking of you.
Marquis de Sade
I am filthy. I am riddled with lice. Hogs, when they look at me, vomit. My skin is encrusted with the scabs and scales of leprosy, and covered with yellow pus.[...] A family of toads has taken up residence in my left armpit and, when one of them moves, it tickles. Mind one of them does not escape and come and scratch the inside of your ear with its mouth; for it would then be able to enter your brain. In my right armpit there is a chameleon which is perpetually chasing them, to avoid starving...
Comte de Lautreamont
His nose was his most distinctive feature: curved like a scimitar at the top but bent flat at the tip, and with the bone of the bridge cut like a diamond--in short, a nose out of a folktale, the sort of sizable, convoluted, intricately turned nose that, for many centuries, confronted though they have been by every imaginable hardship, the Jews have never stopped making.
Philip Roth
Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been.
Edna O'Brien
Mimi was massaging Salander's back and neck. She had been kneading intently for 20 minutes while Salander mainly enjoyed herself and uttered an occasional groan of pleasure. A massage from Mimi was a fantastic experience, and she felt like a kitten who just wanted to purr and wave its paws around.
Steig Larsson