💬 Quotes

"We have consistently mapped our national identity onto the topography, turning mountains and rivers into symbols of political destiny and moral rectitude."

"The tension between the preservation of 'natural' beauty and the encroaching demands of modernization remains the defining conflict of the American spatial experience."

"Even in our most urbanized environments, the American landscape retains the phantom ache of the frontier, a reminder that the wild is never fully conquered, only temporarily contained."

"I am young, I am twenty years old; but I know nothing of life except despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow."

"We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces."

"A hospital alone shows what war is."

"It is not the war that is the main thing, but the misery, the misery that is the reality of the war. It is not the heroes that are the main thing, but the men."

"We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost."

"He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the sentence: All quiet on the Western Front."

"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."

"I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip."

"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."

"Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark."

"I have to return some videotapes."

"This is not an exit."

"It’s not actually true that I can turn water into wine, my dear. I can, however, turn wine into breakfast."

"It is said that the night is darkest just before the dawn. It is also said that the dawn is brightest just before the sun burns everything to a crisp."

"Humanity takes up so much room. It’s hard to tell where the people stop and the mess begins."

"You don't have to be a bad person to be on the side of evil, and you don't have to be a good person to be on the side of good."

"If you stopped every time you were afraid, you’d never do anything at all."