Hunter S. Thompson

America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

You better take care of me Lord, if you don’t you’re gonna have me on your hands.

Robert Frost

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Virginia Woolf

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? – the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world – a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.

Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

Shakespeare

“I have done penance for condemning love,

Whose high imperious thoughts have punished me

With bitter fasts, with penitential groans,

With nightly tears and daily heart-sore sighs.

For in revenge of my contempt of love

Love hath chased sleep from my enthralled eyes,

And made them watchers of mine own heart’s sorrow.”

[The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.4.121-8]

 

“Time is the nurse and breeder of all good”

[The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.4.242]

 

“…that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;”

[Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.45-6]

 

“Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O anything, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!–
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.”

[Romeo and Juliet, 1.1]

 

Romeo. Is love a tender thing? it is too rough, Too rude, too boisterous; and it pricks like thorn.

Mercutio. If love be rough with you, be rough with love; Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.

[Romeo and Juliet, 1.4]

 

Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.

[Romeo and Juliet, 1.5]

 

My only love sprung from my only hate!;
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me,
That I must love a loathed enemy.

[Romeo and Juliet, 1.5]

 

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!–
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she

[Romeo and Juliet, 2.2]

 

There is thy gold; worse poison to men’s souls,
Doing more murders in this loathsome world
Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell:
I sell thee poison; thou hast sold me none.

[Romeo and Juliet, 5.1]

 

If music be the food of love, play on;

[Twelfth Night (I, i,1-3)]

 

The course of true love never did run smooth.”

–From A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I, i, 134)

 

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

–From Macbeth (V, v, 19)

 

“O, beware, my lord of jealousy;
It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.”

–From Othello (III, iii, 165-167)

 

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”

–From As You Like It (II, vii, 139-143)

 

“So wise so young, they say do never live long.”

–From King Richard III (III, i, 79)

 

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep…”

–From The Tempest (IV, i, 156-157)

 

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

–From Hamlet (III, iii, 100-103)

 

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

–From Hamlet (III, ii, 239)