Thomas Berger Quotes

If you want to really relax sometime, just fall to rock bottom and you'll be a happy man. Most all troubles come from having standards.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

The truth is always made up of little particulars which sound ridiculous when repeated.

You got to knock a man down and put your knife at his throat before he'll hear you, like I did to that trooper. The truth seems hateful to most everybody.

I have a belief that a man's real relatives are scattered throughout the universe, and seldom if ever belong to his immediate kin.

Time is the bastard offspring of an incestuous act that God committed upon reality." Merlin to Arthur in "Arthur Rex

I expect Custer was crazy enough to believe he would win, being the type of man who carries the whole world within his own head and thus when his passion is aroused and floods his mind, reality is utterly drowned.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain't done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.

The buffalo eats grass, I eat him, and when I die, the earth eats me and sprouts more grass. Therefore nothing is ever lost, and each thing is everything forever, though all things move.

Most of the people I have really cared about in this world, I have elected to the position. I have a belief that a man’s real relatives are scattered throughout the universe, and seldom if ever belong to his immediate kin.

I love her still, for if you know anything about that kind of feeling, you know how close it is connected to hopelessness and thus is about the only thing in civilization that don't degenerate with time.

When you run into a story of more than three against one and one winning, then you have heard a lie.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

Tell us, Merlin,” said he, “why do we feel no sense of triumph in this?” And Merlin answered, “Well, is not triumph a childish feeling, Sire?

You might have thought the colonel would be interested in my experiences of five years’ barbarism, but he wasn’t. I wasn’t long in discovering that it is a rare person in the white world who wants to hear what the other fellow says, all the more so when the other fellow really knows what he is talking about.

It was strange how in no time at all everybody went from fear to being excruciatingly bored, and the very women who yesterday had been helpless victims and just minutes earlier were howling in fright, now began to advance on him threatening with their fists and saying: 'Git on out of here, you old skunk!' Which shows something about the way a female is put together; she will suffer any outrage so long as it is interesting, but bore her and she don't know fear.

Then I am fundamentally a slave, I whom you call the most glorious king of all?” said Arthur. “No man is free who needeth air to breathe,” said Merlin.

All human beings must perform according to their nature.

…What it means is you will fight until you’re all used up. Far from being sour, life is so sweet you will live it to the hilt and be consumed by it.

For he was big, and I don’t care what you say, for every inch a man grows over five foot five, his brain diminishes proportionately. All my life I have had a prejudice against overgrown louts.

time belongs to everybody and everything, and nobody and nothing can lay claim to any part of it exclusively, so if you talk about the past as though there was just one version of it that everybody agrees on, you might be seen as stealing the spirit of others,

Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.

like all wicked people he could do things which defied the means of honest men, for evil is always more easily managed than virtue.)

It is finally only the fiend who doth truly worship God, as the felon adores the hangman, for the one is defined by the other.

privilege is founded on duty, and if the horse carries the man, the animal is fed before the rider himself doth eat. Thus in certain respects the first comes last, and the greatest king is the loneliest.

But, Sire, the curse which shall ruin you eventually is the selfsame which ruins all men, irrespective of their actions good or evil, and that is Time, which is the issue of an incestuous act performed by God on reality.

but we must show them that shedding blood should have nothing to do with being a man.” This of course was said by someone who was not of the male sex. If she had created men they would have been nicer than the ones turned out by God.

Specific reifications are variations on this general theme. Marriage, for instance, may be reified as an imitation of divine acts of creativity, as a universal mandate of natural laws, as the necessary consequences of biological or psychological forces, or, for that matter, as a functional imperative of the social system. What all these reifications have in common is their obfuscation of marriage as an ongoing human production. [...] Through reification, the world of institutions appears to merge with the world of nature.

Hickok and the others now returned from looking at the saloon sign, and this suck-up who had been talking to me, he asked what happened and another man says: “He put all ten inside the hole of the O, by God!” And everybody was whistling and gasping at the wonder of it—well, not exactly everybody, for there was other scouts and gun-handlers around, people like Jack Gallagher, Billy Dixon, Old Man Keeler, and more who was well known in them days, and they looked thoughtful so as not to display jealousy. As elsewhere in life, there are specialists on one hand, and the audience on the other.

Therapy entails the conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay within the institutionalized definitions of reality, or, in other words, to prevent "inhabitants" of a given universe from "emigrating". It does this by applying the legitimating apparatus to individual "cases". Since ever society faces the danger of individual deviance, we may assume that therapy in one form or another is a global social phenomena. Its specific institutional arrangements, from exorcism to psycho-analysis, from pastoral care to personal counseling programmes, belong, of course, under the category of social control. [...] Since therapy must concern itself with deviations from the "official" definition of reality, it must develop a machinery to account for such deviations and to maintain the realities thus challenged. This requires a body of knowledge that include a theory of deviance, a diagnostic apparatus, and a conceptual system for the "cure of souls".

No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.

Caroline was one of them people who utter three failures of judgment for every two words they speak, and by trying to correct them, you only succeed in presenting further occasion on which to exercise their vice, so I kept my remarks to the minimum. “So after

Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain’t done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.

There is no permanent winning or losing when things move, as they should, in a circle. For is not life continuous? And though I shall die, shall I not also continue to live in everything that is?

If you want to really relax sometime, just fall to rock bottom and you’ll be a happy man. Most all troubles come from having standards.

In his involuntary haste he hooked his foot in an arch of root which fate had cunningly thrown across the path to impede fat men who desperately went after dropped lanterns: the remainder of this arrangement comprised clusters of sharp stones at just the places where such a man, falling, would deploy his hand to catch himself.

On the other hand, Enid in her twenties had been almost recessive, at least in the character she revealed to others. Keese could well remember how chagrining it had been for him to hear her evade a hostess' inquiry as to what she would like to drink. It had taken him years to understand that this was not indecisiveness but rather a purposeful means to establish her existence as one that could not be disposed of by the mere provision of refreshment.

But as luck would have it his means of resisting fright was to simulate boldness—alone at night on a darkened city street he would invariably, teeth tightly occluded, steer himself towards any threatening shadow that offered itself, on the principle that all malefactors abhor the initiative of others.

A man is most susceptible to terror when he is in the earlier phases of his night's sleep.

If you continued to overestimate your enemy, he would eventually realize the prediction: some law worked in such cases, perhaps the reverse of Diminishing Returns.

I must now return to my prayers in the chapel,” said Sir Meligrant, but when he left his father, he went rather to his private store of torture-instruments and taking up a file, did sharpen the steel tips of his cat-o'-nine-tails, the better to lacerate Guinevere’s white back, then he oiled the threads of the thumbscrews he would tighten to crack the bones of her delicate fingers, and whilst he was doing this he became so aroused in anticipation (for his greatest ambition had been realised: to have the most beautiful woman in the world as his helpless captive), that he fainted dead away in bliss.

For what do mortals know, with their limited means? Except that earthly life, whether noble or base, is sad, and the oceans of the world are created from the salt tears of men.

But Reinhart had seen the pictures first time around, which was another thing entirely. It made him despondent to hear youngsters with a taste for The Thirties. They were out to take all and earn nothing. Past eras were recalled for their amusement, minus the pain and deprivation of those who survived them. You never ran into nostalgia for breadlines and apple-selling veterans

Kita adalah produk dari interaksi sosial, dan pada saat yang sama kita adalah agen yang membentuk masyarakat

When the deep structures (the balance of power, economic interest, and so forth) that drive international and domestic politics favor conflict, historical narratives are generated that support conflict. When they do not, those narratives disappear, to be replaced by new narratives that support more cooperative and peaceful relations. To put it simply, it is money and bayonets that make the world go around, not whatever peculiar notions people may have about ancient grievances and past glories.

In the Indian code, if you see a stranger you either eat with him or fight him, but more often you eat with him, fighting being too important an enterprise to waste on somebody you hardly know. We all could have run into one of their camps, and they would have had to feed us.

And Launcelot and Guinevere were the most notable pair of adulterers ever to be, for their joining was not in ignorance of the consequences nor as a result of a magical potion, but they came together from Envy and Vanity and the offspring of these: the hunger for mastery by man over woman and vice versa.

To the profound vision there is no virtue and no vice, and what is justice for one is injustice for another.

comedic American novelists. Stanley Elkin and Thomas Berger got me laughing out loud. So did Bruce Jay Friedman. John Cheever.

Recalls The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the better work of Jim Thompson (The Grifters; After Dark, My Sweet) and Thomas Berger’s tales of small-town souls who succumb to murderous mayhem.

That silly pimp!

Is it not human for us all to have two minds, the one that sees an aspect of eternity, the other that must deal with the life which is measured in Time?

. . . the cell beyond which the life of the book cannot be traced, a novel being a structure of such cells. In another sense, only the sentence exists or at any rate can be proved to exist. Even at the stage of the paragraph things are becoming theoretical and arbitrary. A ‘novel’ is an utter hallucination; no definition of it, for example, can really distinguish it from a laundry list. But a sentence – there you have something essential, to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken.

...he referred to himself like he was an institution: personally, he didn’t care so much about these supposed outrages of mine, but he could not let the noble firm of Wild Bill Hickok, Inc., be loosely dealth with.

O foolish man, for God doth detect every nuance of the sick will!

He who asks a question remains a fool for five minutes. He who does not ask remains a fool forever”.~proverb “It is  not the answer that enlightens but the question.”-Eugene Jonesco “The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.” —-Thomas Berger “There is no stupid question: stupid people don’t ask questions.”~Olivia

I don’t know if you ever ate his chili. Some kids don’t like it, but I do, a lot. It’s on spaghetti?