Favorite books

"…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing…."

"The better you look, the more you see."

"Got you. You're mine now. For the rest of the day, week, month, year, life. Have you guessed who I am? Sometimes I think you have. Sometimes when you're standing in a crowd I feel those sultry, dark eyes of yours stop on me. Are you too afraid to come up to me and let me know how you feel? I want to moan and writhe with you and I want to go up to you and kiss your mouth and pull you to me and say "I love you I love you I love you" while stripping. I want you so bad it stings. I want to kill the ugly girls that you're always with. Do you really like those boring, naive, coy, calculating girls or is it just for sex? The seeds of love have taken hold, and if we won't burn together, I'll burn alone."

"No one ever likes the right person."

"War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength."

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly."

"I like being myself. Myself and nasty."

"Well then," she said in a low voice of contained violence. "You should have refused to obey."
I almost shouted : "Elsie-"
And for a second, I was unable to find my words.
"But," I said, my throat constricted. "But, Elsie, what you are saying – it’s… the opposite of honour."
"And what about what you are doing ?"
"For a soldier, to refuse to obey ! And in any case, it wouldn’t have changed anything. They would have discharged me, tortured me, executed me… And you, what would have become of you ? And the children ?"
"Ah," said Elsie. "All that, all that…"
I interrupted her. "And it would have been for nothing anyway. Someone else would have done it in my place."
Her eyes flashed. "Yes, but you," she said. "You wouldn’t have done it."

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, General Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

"What does he say?’ he asked.
He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re gong to die.’
Tell him,’ the colonel said, smiling, ‘that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can."

“What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay.”

"A good book is an event in my life."

"What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin'? Well you're not! You're not! You're no crazier than the average asshole out walkin' around on the streets and that's it. "

"Everyone has been harassing me with Nana ever since this morning. I've met over twenty people and it's been nothing but Nana this and Nana that! How should I know anything about her? Do you think I know every girl in Paris? Nana is one of Bordenave's discoveries. She must be something magnificent!"

"I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can."

"It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire."