Hating Olivia: Quotations

"I know why I write. I write because I must. I cannot stop. I'm driven by rage and insanity and crushing ambition." - Dan Fante (introduction)

About Life

"The war was over. I'd managed to avoid it, but it didn't mean a thing."

"The parade of forgettable days that made up the long hazy years have always seemed to be a matter of struggling to keep my head above water, and a roof over it. It was nothing much of a life."

"Like a beggar who covets the palace of the kingdom, I wanted what I couldn't have. But I was tired of coveting the unattainable."

"Sure, I was glad I wasn't one of them-but where the hell was I?"

"Death as we all know, spares no favorites, respects no specific time or place."

"When I contemplated what a man had to endure in order to get by in this world, it turned my stomach."

"Life got to be what it's supposed to be at least some little part of our time here on earth: perfect."

"The veneer of authenticity could be a falsehood, and the appearance of uncertainty and dubiousness much closer to truth and honesty."

"You can get inside a woman's body, but you can never get inside the head. Not really."

"It's extraordinary how time disappears when you're doing nothing. Blink once and the days have vanished into history."

"... because you can't be afraid to take chances in life."

"It couldn't escape me that people younger than myself had already achieved worldwide recognition for their achievements."

"In life, you can't ask for the moon and the planets. It's definitely best to learn to be content with the small things, if you can."

"No, none of it was worth taking too seriously. Hadn't I realized the deep uselessness of existence a long time ago?"

"If you weren't doing something you like in life, well, what good was the money? What good was all the money in the world if you didn't want to be where you are?"

"Life is a matter of dollars and cents - artistic pretensions don't amount to a hill of horse dung."

"All good things must come to an end. Sometimes they come to an end in the guise of good news."

"There must be something worse in life-like polio and schizophrenia and terminal cancer-than taking on a job you didn't want, no?"

"You don't have to make it too far in years to realize that the catastrophes and disasters are lying in wait around every corner, and that at some point you're going to become a victim yourself."

“The worst part of most suffering is it’s utter banality. Like an itch that refuses to go away, you scratch and claw at your wound until it festers and infects and oozes its ugly pus. But unless you throw yourself from the roof or blow your brains out, the world sees nothing, knows nothing, understands nothing of your torment, whatever your torment may be.”

“Day and night it gnaws at you, until finally you have to laugh at yourself- if you’ve got a sense of humor left...”

“No wonder the world was full of miserable people! ... if a human being was not following his deepest, most natural inclinations, if he was forced into the truss of unfulfilling labor, his existence was fated to be a hell on earth. Where flower is not watered, it is sure to wilt...”

“There’s no worse torture than not being able to rest in peace.”

“If nobody ever saw the fruits of my creation, what did it matter?”

“I couldn’t really sink much lower, even in my own eyes.”

"There is nothing so fascinating as misery, especially when it's not your own."

“I feel for all those dead people. Because I know what it’s like to give up the ghost.”

"Even if hope was at bottom an insidious quantity. Better to live without a shred of hope than to live within the hazes of illusion."

"They were the real losers in life, desperate to fit in, frantic to "make it" in the eyes of society. For all my failures and weaknesses, at least I wasn't that."

“We’re all losers in the game of life; nobody gets out of it in one piece-or alive.”

“We were all mired in a poisonous slough of deceit and treachery, whether gods, nobles-or motel clerks. The only difference between us was that the rich and powerful enjoyed themselves more than ordinary mortals during their time in hell.”

“The salt of the earth were the ones to be admired, not the children of privilege, not the precious artists, not the rich and famous.”

“Life is that sort of illusion - you can think you’ve travelled to the ends of the Earth only to find yourself no further than your own backyard.”

"When I stopped struggling to get back on my feet long enough to think about it, life really wasn't all that bad."

More Personal

"Someday, I want to write books, novels. That's my great ambition."

"I was most decidedly a lone wolf, a contrarian, and a foot soldier to my own private drummer."

"I'd developed a new hunger for words, words, more words - so long as they weren't mine."

"...I went nowhere. All those books, of course, were nothing but a big, fat excuse for not coming to grips with my own self. The fact is I had no idea who I really was, had no clue whether I possessed talent - or even value-of any kind, hadn't the faintest idea what I was supposed to do with myself in this life."

"Where in the world had I come by the idea that I possessed some sort of illustrious future as an artist int he first place... What gall! What stupid audacity! What ludicrous castles built in the air! The fact that I had no discernible talent."

"After all, what were a few million words more or less on this earth? Why fret over posterity when the sun is certain to run out of hydrogen and commence dying in one billion, one hundred million years? On that day, who was going to remember the purveyors of measly words?"

"Wasn't I merely the victim of my own laziness, my own inability to cope with the world as it was?"

"Once you relinquish your dreams - the dreams that bubble up from the deepest wells of your real self - you're finished, you're dead; it doesn't matter how much jack you're bringing down."

"The most important thing was that I was doing it; in one sense, it was all a writer could ever ask for, and it sure beat the shit out of some of the other ways I'd frittered away time in my life."

Relationship

"I thought you and I were going to live. Travel. Write. I thought we weren't going to get caught like all the rest of them."

"At first, I thought that you'd take me away from all this. I really did. That's all I ever wanted-somebody to take me away from all this."

"They say a real love story never ends. But the truth is that given enough time, love will usually morph into its opposite-repulsion, hatred,... indifference. What do you think the world’s problem is? It’s the exhaustion bred by familiarity and tedium, the transience of romance."

"A certain addiction, like heroin and cigarettes or alcohol, once overcome, will always remain a source of fascination-that's all. Maybe some little part of every love story never really ends."

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