Quote: John Fante

Oh for a Mexican girl! I used to think of her all the time, my Mexican girl. I didn't have one, but the streets were full of them, the Plaza and Chinatown were afire with them, and in my fashion they were mine, this one and that one, and some day when another cheque came it would be a fact. Meanwhile it was free and they were Aztec princessesand Mayan princesses, the peon girls in the Grand Central Market, in the Church of Our Lady, and I even went to Mass to look at them. That was sacrilegious conduct but it was better than not going to Mass at all, so that when I wrote home to Colorado to my mother I could write with truth. Dear Mother: I went to Mass last Sunday.

...

'Arturo', she said. 'Why do we fight all the time?'
I didn't know. I said something about temperaments, but she shook her head and crossed her knees, and a sense of her fine thighs being lifted lay heavily in my mind, thick suffocating sensation, warm lush desire to take them in my hands. Every move she made, the soft turn of her neck, the large breasts swelling under the smock, her fine hands upon the bed, the fingers spread out, these things disturbed me, a sweet painful heaviness dragging me into stupor. Then the sound of her voice, restrained, hinting of mockery, a voice that talked to my blood and bones.

Ask the dust, 1939

Quote: Fernando Pessoa

Habíamos acabado de cenar. A mi lado, mi amigo el banquero, gran comerciante y notable estraperlista, fumaba como quien no piensa. La conversación, que había ido languideciendo, yacía muerta ante nosotros. Intenté reanimarla al tuntún, con algo que recordé de pronto. Me volví hacia él, sonriendo.

- Por cierto: hace poco alguien me dijo que en tiempos usted fue anarquista...

- Lo fui y lo soy. A ese respecto no he cambiado. Soy anarquista.

...

Por anarquismo entiendo aquella doctrina social extrema que proclama que no ha de haber entre los hombres mas diferencias o desigualdades que las puramente naturales, y que no han de pesar sobre los hombres penas y males distintos a aquellos que Naturaleza reparte...

La abolición, pues, de todas las castas, de la aristocracia, del dinero, de todas las convenciones sociales que promueven la desigualdad. La abolición, también, de todas las desigualdades sociales que se oponen a la Naturaleza: las patrias, las religiones, el matrimonio...

...

- Intenté dilucidar cuál era la primera, la más importante de las ficciones sociales. Sería esa la que debería, antes que ninguna otra, intentar subyugar, intentar reducir a la inactividad. La más importante, al menos en nuestro tiempo, es el dinero. ¿Cómo subyugar al dinero, o más precisamente, a la fuerza, la tiranía del dinero?...

...Lo más simple era apartarme de la esfera de su influencia, es decir, de la civilización; irme al campo a comer raíces y beber agua de los manantiales, andar desnudo y vivir como un animal. Pero eso, aunque no entrañase la menor dificultad, no era combatir las ficciones sociales; ni siquiera era combatir: era huir... ¿Cómo subyugar al dinero combatiéndolo?... Sólo de un modo - adquiriéndolo, adquiriéndolo en cantidad suficiente como para no sufrir su influencia; y cuanto mayor fuera la cantidad en que lo adquiriese, más libre estaría de su influencia...

O banqueiro anarquista, 1922.
Merci Raul.

Quote: Luke Rhinehart

'What is the dice man, Luke?' Lil repeated. She hadn't moved since entering the room. I saw Arlene start and felt her eyes upon me as I turned back to Lil.

'The Dice man,' I said slowly, 'is an experiment in changing the personality, in destroying the personality.'

'Is interesting,' Dr Krum said.

'Go on,' Lil said.

'To destroy the single dominant personality one must be capable of developing many personalities; one must become multiple.'

'You're stalling,' Lil said. 'What is the dice man?'

'The Dice Man (...) is a creature whose actions are decided from day to day by the roll of dice, the dice choosing from among options created by the man.'

. . .

The dice in position before him, he knelt silently for two minutes and prayed. He then picked up the two dice and began shaking them gaily in the bowl of his hands.

Tremble in my hands, O Die,
As I so shake in yours.

And holding the dice above his head he intoned aloud:

'Great bleak Blocks of God, descend, quiver, create,
Into your hands I commit my soul.'

The dice fell: a one and a two - three. He was to leave his wife and children forever.

The dice man, 1971

Quote: Philip K. Dick (2)

The Nexus-6. He had now come up against it. Rachael, he realized; she must be a Nexus-6. I'm seeing one of them for the first time. And they damn near did it; they came awfully damn close to undermining the Voigt-Kampff scale, the only method we have for detecting them. The Rosen Association does a good job-makes a good try, anyhow-at protecting its products.

And I have to face six more of them, he reflected. Before I'm finished.

He would earn the bounty money. Every cent.

Assuming he made it through alive.

Do androids dream of electric sheep?, 1966

Quote: Philip K. Dick

Charles Freck, becoming progressively more and more depressed by what was happening to everybody he knew, decided finally to off himself. There was no problem, in the circles where he hung out, in putting an end to yourself: you just bought into a large quantity of reds and took them with some cheap wine, late at night, with the phone off the hook so no one would interrupt you...

At the last moment (as end time closed in on him) he changed his mind on a decisive issue and decided to drink the reds down with a connoisseur wine... so he set off on one last drive and bought a bottle of 1971 Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon...

Back home again, he uncorked the wine, let it breathe, drank a few glasses of it... tried to think of something meaningful but could not... and then, with a glass of the Cavernet Sauvignon, gulped down all the reds at once.

After that, the deed being done, he lay back... and waited. However, he had been burned. The capsules were not barbiturates, as represented. They were some kind of kinky psychedelics, of a type he had never dropped before, probably a misture, and new on the market. Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to hallucinate. Well, he thought philosophically, this is the story of my life. Always ripped off. He had to face the fact - considering how many of the capsules he had swallowed - that he was in for some trip.

The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed looking down at him disapprovingly... "You're going to read me my sins", Charles Freck said. The creature nodded and unsealed the scroll. Freck said, lying helpless on his bed, "and it's going to take a hundred thousand hours." Fixing its many compound eyes on him, the creature from between dimensions said, "...Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end."...

Ten thousand years later they had reached the sixth grade. The year he had discovered masturbation. He shut his eyes, but the could still see the multi-eyed, eight-foot-high being with its endless scroll reading on and on...

Charles Freck thought, at least I got a good wine.

A scanner darkly, 1977

Quote: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

...Aside from the misperception of one's performance, there is a social treadmill effect: you get rich, move to rich neighbourhoods, the become poor again. To that add the psychological treadmill effect; you get used to wealth and revert to a set point of satisfaction. This problem of some people never really getting to feel satisfied by wealth (beyond a given point) has been the subject of technical discussions on happiness...

...I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money... we should remember that becoming rich is a purely selfish act, not a social one. The virtue of capitalism is that society can take advantage of people's greed rather than their benevolence, but there's no need to, in addition, extol such greed as a moral (or intellectual) accomplishment...

Fooled by Randomness, 2004

Quote: Charles Bukowski

...I got lost somehow, began staring at her legs. I was always a leg man. It was the first thing I saw when I was born. But then I was trying to get out. Ever since I have been working in the other direction and with pretty lousy luck...

...So there I was, back at the office the next day. I was feeling unfulfilled and, frankly, rather crappy about everything. I wasn't going anywhere and neither was the rest of the world. We were all just hanging around waiting to die and meanwhile doing little things to fill the space. Some of us weren't even doing little things. We were vegetables. I was one of those. I don't know what kind of vegetable I was. I felt like a turnip. I lit a cigar, inhaled, and pretended that I knew what the hell...

Pulp, 1994