Bob Marley

Alice In Wonderland (2010 film)

Kurt Vonnegut

J.D. Salinger

"A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket."

"Just Before the War with the Eskimos"

Ernest Hemingway

"You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. It's sort of what we have instead of God."

The Sun Also Rises

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream.

-Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Jim Jarmusch

Marcel DuChamp

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

But by then her acceptance of her fate was so deep that she was not even upset by the certainty that all possibility of rectification were closed to her.

-One Hundred Years Of Solitude

"Brothers and Sisters"

"I talked to someone who reminded me who I am and who I am not. It's not that I'm old fashioned or, as she put it, your average girl; it's that I want to feel that I'm enough for a man. Just me, for once in my life, just me. That's what I want."

- Norah in "Owning It"

Rose Franken

Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.

J.D. Salinger

“Everything everybody does is so—I don't know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.”

-Franny and Zooey

Nicole Krauss

"Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact."

-The History of Love

Chuck Palahniuk

"It's not about looking good, at least not on the surface--but you still win. Just let yourself be broken and humiliated. Just your whole life, keep telling people, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry..."

-Choke

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"A person doesn't die when he should but when he can."

-One Hundred Years Of Solitude

William Faulkner

"Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets."

-Intruder in the Dust

Diane Setterfield

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some their is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”

-The Thirteenth Tale

Famous Last Words - Robert Phillips

for Dana Gioia

"It has all been very interesting!"
declared Lady Mary Wortley Montague.
Examining his sickroom, Oscar Wilde railed,
"Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."
Told the angels were waiting for him,
Ethan Allen quipped, "Let 'em wait."
"I am so very happy," Gerard Manley Hopkins cooed.
Goethe pleaded for "More light, more light."

Madame de Pompadour cried out to God,
"Wait a minute!" rouged her cheeks red.
"I suppose I am turning into a god?"
The dying Emperor Vespasian said.
Henry James, succumbing to a massive stroke,
"So it has come ... The Distinguished Thing."
Pancho Villa pleaded, "Don't let it end
like this. Tell 'em I said something."

Gertrude to Alice B.: "What is the answer?"
[Silence] "In that case, what is the question?"
"If this is dying, I don't think much of it,"
Muttered Lytton Strachey. When undone,
Julius Caesar managed, "Et tu, Brute?"
Edmund Kean: "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."
Chekhov: "It's been so long since I've had champagne."
Goethe: "More light, more light," then departed.

J.D. Salinger

"Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash."

Franny and Zooey

Horace

Dulce ridens, dulce loquens.
("Sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking." From Ode XXII)