Pulp Quotes

Never believe everything you read; all writers are liars, it's what we do. ~ Callie Press

I think, for sure, 'Saturday Night Fever' and 'Pulp Fiction' were kind of bookends for - or the pillars of - my career. ~ John Travolta

You get Don King's point of view in what is almost a Shakespearean, classical technique. He comes across almost like a lovable rogue, like Iago in 'Othello' or Richard III. He's doing all these bad things, but I kind of like him. It's like 'Pulp Fiction': Everybody's a bad guy, yet you like them. ~ Ving Rhames

This will sound crazy, but I'm saving it. For my nursing home list." "You mean bucket list." "Oh no, that's totally different. A nursing home list is a list of things you plan on reading and watching in a nursing home. A bucket list is more like . . . visit Nigeria, jump out of an airplane. A nursing home list is like, read The Western Coast and watch Pulp Fiction and listen to the latest Daft Punk album. ~ Caroline Kepnes

Yes, she's coming home for a visit. No, I will not give you a free pass. You put one finger on her, I'll beat you to a pulp."

Tai snarled low in his throat, his wide shoulders going stiff as he fisted his hands. "Yeah, well, maybe I'll beat you back." Face thunderous, he stalked off as she fought her smile. Hmm, perhaps Judd's young protégé had potential. None of the others had dared stand up to her. ~ Nalini Singh

I have a corn creamer that I love. It extracts pulp and juice from kernels, and I simmer that down into a creamed corn that has an almost mashed potato-like consistency. I add butter and hit it with chopped fresh chives at the end for an accent of color. ~ Nick Offerman

The yew tree is the most important of all the healing trees, it said. It lives for thousands of years. Its berries, its bark, its leaves, its sap, its pulp, its wood, they all thrum and burn and twist with life. It can cure almost any ailment man suffers from, mixed and treated by the right apothecary. ~ Patrick Ness

What I've learned is just how resilient love can be. You can beat it, pound it into pulp, but killing it is hard to do. ~ Ellen Hopkins

I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig. ~ Andrea Dworkin

It's simple. If you go to see 'Saturday Night Fever' expecting it to be good, it's a corker. However, if you go expecting it to be a crock of shit, it's that, too. Thus 'Saturday Night Fever' can exist in two mutually opposing states at the very same time, yet only by the weight of our expectations. From this principle we can deduce that any opposing states can be governed by human expectation - even, as in the case of retro-deficit-engineering, the present use of a future technology."
"I think I understand that. Does it work with any John Travolta movie?"
"Only the artistically ambiguous ones such as 'Pulp Fiction' or 'Face/Off.' 'Battlefield Earth' doesn't work, because it's a stinker no matter how much you think you're going to like it, and 'Get Shorty' doesn't work either, because you'd be hard-pressed not to enjoy it, irrespective of any preconceived notions. ~ Jasper Fforde

The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils. ~ Henry David Thoreau

He has a heart so huge, it's kept pumping, kept going long past endurance - even though life has bruised it to a pulp. ~ Nalini Singh

The words he had written wiggled off the page and escaped from the drawer. The letters stacked themselves, one on top of the other. Their towers reached higher and higher until they stood majestic and tall, surrounding Neftali in a city of promise. HUMANITY. SOLIDARITY. GENEROSITY. PEACE. JUSTICE. LOVE. Then a tiny, conceited word came along. Like a hungry termite, it began to gnaw on the tall words, chewing at their foundation, gulping their pulp until they swayed, toppled, and collapsed. All that remained was one fat, satisfied syllable. FEAR. ~ Pam Munoz Ryan

Life in this village is like that of a louse hanging on to a wrinkle in a loincloth. ~ Susumu Katsumata

The feeling was FEAR, she realized... but it was a new type of fear; more sincere than the jitters she felt when it rained and not as piercing as the terror of crashing cars. This fear was darker somehow... mysterious... curious like the retracted paws of an alley cat. ~ Jake Vander-Ark

Being chronically shy I needed to create a persona for myself and be involved with a band where I could be ruler of my own kingdom. Then Pulp became hugely popular and I lost control of it, which is when it all went wrong. ~ Jarvis Cocker

The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate. ~ Isaac Asimov

Jason Todd: Bruce, I forgive you for not saving me. But why? Why on God's Earth is HE still alive? Ignoring what he's done in the past. Blindly, stupidly, disregarding the entire graveyards he's filled, the thousands who have suffered, the friends he's crippled. You know, I thought... I thought I'd be the last person you'd ever let him hurt. If it had been you he beat to a bloody pulp, if he had taken you from this world, I would've done nothing but search the planet for this pathetic pile of evil death-worshiping garbage and sent him off to Hell.
Bruce: You don't understand. I don't think you've ever understood.
Jason: What? What, your moral code just won't allow for that? It's too hard to cross that line?
Bruce: No! God almighty, no. It'd be too damned easy. All I've ever wanted to do is kill him. But if I do that... if I allow myself to go down into that place... I'll never come back.
Jason: Why? I'm not talking about killing Penguin, or Scarecrow, or Dent. I'm talking about him. Just him. And doing it because... because he took me away from you. ~ Judd Winick

Back in my pulp-mag days, I worked from about 8:30 to noon, took an hour off for lunch, and worked again from one to three, for a work day of five and a half hours or so. I wrote 20 to 30 pages of copy in that time, doing it all first draft, so that I was able to produce a short story of 5,000-7,500 words in a single day. ~ Robert Silverberg

This wasn't a case of gilding the lily. If there was a lily underneath all that, it had long since been crushed to a pulp. The party stopped in its tracks as she took off her cloak, frozen in wordless contemplation of a wardrobe that made the word "gaudy" sound sweet and demure by contrast. ~ Courtney Milan

You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It's the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your mouth. ~ Mike Carey

The balled Pulp of your heart Confronts its small Mill of silence ~ Sylvia Plath

She shrugged. "I fell. I'm a clumsy fool." "I know how you feel. I'm such a fool I knocked half my teeth out and hacked my leg to useless pulp. Look at me now, a cripple. It's amazing where a little foolishness can take you, if it goes unchecked. ~ Joe Abercrombie

In pulp fiction it is a rigid convention that the hero's shoulders and the heroine's balcon constantly threaten to burst their bonds, a possibility which keeps the audience in a state of tense expectancy. Unfortunately for the fans, however, recent tests reveal that the wisp of chiffon which stands between the publisher and the postal laws has the tensile strength of drop-forged steel. ~ S.J Perelman

I suspect if we were as familiar with our bones as with our skin, we'd never bury dead but shrine them in their rooms, arranged as we might like to find them on a visit; and our enemies, if we could steal their bodies from the battle sites, would be museumed as they died, the steel still eloquent in their sides, their metal hats askew, the protective toes of their shoes unworn, and friend and enemy would be so wondrously historical that in a hundred years we'd find the jaws still hung for the same speech and all the parts we spent our life with titled as they always were - rib cage, collar, skull - still repetitious, still defiant, angel light, still worthy of memorial and affection. After all, what does it mean to say that when our cat has bitten through the shell and put confusion in the pulp, the life goes out of them? Alas for us, I want to cry, our bones are secret, showing last, so we must love what perishes: the muscles and the waters and the fats. ~ William H Gass

Lend stood staring blankly at the shelves of food. Arianna had sneaked upstairs to eat - or rather, drink - in private. "I have no idea what to make. I'm too exhausted to think."
"You have no right to be tired. And I never want to see you asleep ever again. I had enough of that for a lifetime these past few days."
"Allow me to take over," Jack said, striding into the kitchen. He nudged Lend out of the way and started pulling out a huge pile of ingredients.
"Can you even cook?"
"If Lend had let me make him an omelet earlier, that question would already be answered."
Lend sat next to me, leaning over and putting his arm under my head as a pillow against the counter. "Remind me again why we trust him now?"
"Because we need all the help we can get. And I think he really is sorry. And a lot of people are going to depend on him of all the faeries leave."
Jack furiously chopped vegetables. "Captain Dependable! Wait, we vetoed that one. The Divine Door Maker? Too much? Hmm . . . Handsome Hero, but maybe I should move away from alliteration. Something sleek. Our Lord and Master Jack."
Lend rolled his eyes and gave me a seriously-can-I-just-beat-him-to-a-pulp look. ~ Kiersten White

The word 'image' is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that a drawing was a tracing, a copy, a second thing, and that the mental image was such a drawing, belonging among our private bric-a-brac. But if in fact it is nothing of the kind, then neither the drawing nor the picture belongs to the in-itself any more than the image does. They are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of sensing makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi-presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary. The picture, the actor's mimicry--these are not extras that I borrow from the real world in order to aim across them at prosaic things in their absence. The imaginary is much nearer to and much farther away from the actual. It is nearer because it is the diagram of the life of the actual in my body, its pulp and carnal obverse exposed to view for the first time...And the imaginary is much further away from the actual because the picture is an analogue only according to the body; because it does not offer to the mind an occasion to rethink the constitutive relations of things, but rather it offers to the gaze traces of the vision of the inside, in order that the gaze may espouse them; it offers to vision that which clothes vision internally, the imaginary texture of the real. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

'Floating Worlds,' published in 1975 and the lone science fiction novel by acclaimed historical novelist Cecelia Holland, was unique in being completely devoid of the usual pulp influences present in much space opera up to that time. ~ Pamela Sargent

Hugo Gernsback invented pulp magazines and the grandfather paradox. Not bad for a charlatan. ~ James Gleick

Men can beat each other to a pulp and still walk away friends. With a woman, once an enemy, always an enemy. Women will sit like a spider, for years, waiting for the chance to strike. They never forget and seldom forgive. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Let's go eat turkey before I beat the crap put of my cousin.
The way he said it, Vlad wasn't sure if Henry wanted to eat instead of beating Joss to a pulp, or if he just didn't want to do it on an empty stomach. ~ Heather Brewer

And also they're just good escapist fun," Vivian said firmly, and Gill subsided beside her, giving an apologetic smile. "To read about these horrible things and know they never happened, and when you're finished you can put down the book and take a deep breath and get on with your life. To know it's fiction – "
"Pulp fiction," Gill said ... ~ Lavie Tidhar

I wasn't trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie. ~ Quentin Tarantino

Are we going to talk about this?" she asked. "You might want to avoid Aaron for a couple days." "That was already the plan," Dan said. "What the hell is going on?" "I'm doing what you asked me to do," Neil said. "I'm fixing them." "That's not what it looked like." Neil shrugged, poked his noodles, and restarted the timer. "If a bone isn't healing straight, you have no choice but to break it. They'll be fine." Matt leaned against the doorframe and arched a brow at Neil. "That's not exactly reassuring. From you 'fine' could mean anything from 'I'm going to hitchhike across the state' to 'I'm beaten to a bloody pulp but I can still hold a racquet'." "Did you bet on them?" Neil asked. Realizing Matt couldn't follow his train of thought, he said, "Aaron and Katelyn." "Everyone except Andrew bet on them," Matt said. "It's not a matter of them working out. It's a matter of when." Neil considered that. "Then they'll be fine. ~ Nora Sakavic

For men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive, sick Thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. Here is the real enemy of the people: our own selves dehumanized into the masses. And where is the David who can slay this giant? ~ Lillian Smith

Dan didn't know how violently he was biting. Just the absolute closeness. Once upon a time he'd hated that body, smashed it, kicked it, beat it into a bleeding pulp, but now he wanted to crawl into it, or kill it, and maim it, to possess it, eat, tear, destroy it, to take it and never leave it again.
His. The body was his, the man was his. His, his, his alone! ~ Marquesate

Who, of men, can tell
That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swell
To melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail,
The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale,
The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones,
The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones,
Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet,
If human souls did never kiss and greet? ~ John Keats

As delightful as Dr. Gibson is, she doesn't have the makings of a farmwife."
Ethan's brows lifted. "Are you thinking about taking a wife?"
West shrugged. "The nights can be long and quiet in the country," he admitted. "If I found a woman who was an interesting companion and attractive enough to bed... yes, I'd consider marrying her." He paused. "Better yet if she were educated. A sense of humor would be icing on the cake. Red hair isn't a requirement, but I do have a fatal weakness for it." West's mouth twisted with a self-mocking grin. "Of course, she'd have to be willing to overlook the fact that I was an undisciplined and obnoxious swill-tub until about three years ago." A nearly imperceptible look of bitterness flashed across his face before he masked it.
"Who is she?" Ethan asked softly.
"No one. An imaginary woman." Averting his gaze, West used the toe of his boot to flick a loose pebble to the side of the drive. "Who happens to despise me," he muttered.
Ethan regarded him with sympathetic amusement. "You might be able to change her opinion."
"Only if I could travel back in time and beat my former self to a pulp. ~ Lisa Kleypas

spattering the walls with pulp and guano, like graffiti artists. ~ Henri Cole

His light blue shuma and silver torque did nothing to hide the mass of cuts, scrapes, and purple bruises that covered his body and made his iridescent tattoos practically glow by contrast. He had a dark bruise under one eye that ran all the way down to the ulumi-lia tattoo on his cheekbone, and another on his jaw.

"This?" He gestured to his battered frame. "Ono, moa halea.I was invited to partake in a wrestling match yesterday afternoon."

"A wrestling match with whom? Kukuna the Stone God?"

His grin flashed, then faltered as the gesture tugged at his split lip. "It was a very intense match. And you have been reading the legends of my people. You are curious about Calberna. This is good."

She grimaced. "Don't jump to conclusions. I read most of those legends before I met you so I could teach the children at the school about Calberna." Then, because curiosity got the best of her, she asked, "So which one of Wynter's men beat you to a pulp?"

His brows rose. "I am unpulped."

"Not from where I'm standing. Or are you saying the other fellow looks worse?"

He cocked his head to one side, as if considering, then gave that charming half grin again and said, "About the same. We declared it equal contest."

"Who did you leave unpulped then?"

"It is of no concern. We had our match. We tested each other's skill and resolve, and came away with a new understanding of each other." ~ C.L. Wilson

Do not define me by my gender or my socio-economic status, Noah Willis. Do not tell me who I am and do not tell me who society thinks I am and then put me in that box and expect me to stay there. Because, I swear to God, I will climb the hell out of that box and I will take that box you've just put me in and I will use that box to smash your face in until you're nothing more than a freckly, bloodied pulp. You got that, sweet cheeks? ~ Megan Jacobson

In his 1973 "literary investigation," The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn exposed the practices of the Soviet penal system: "If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the 'secret brand'); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. ~ Donnie Eichar

We have all grown up, one might say, thinking of nature as an
adorable, helpless bunny that some people want to protect and
others, motivated by the will to power that is the unmentionable
force behind so much of contemporary culture, want to stomp into
a bloody pulp just to show that they can. Both sides are mistaken,
for what they have misidentified as a bunny is one paw of a sleep-
ing grizzly bear who, if roused, is quite capable of tearing both sides
limb from limb and feasting on their carcasses. The bear, it must be
remembered, is bigger than we are, and stronger. We forget this at
our desperate peril. ~ John Michael Greer

A ricefield near Vercelli under creamy summer haze. the wings of her drooping hat shadow her false smile. Shadows streak her falsely smiling face, smitten by the hot creamy light, grey wheyhued shadows under the jawbones, streaks of eggyolk yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour lurking within the softened pulp of the eyes. ~ James Joyce

(I'm not online.) I don't have a fax. I don't go in for any of that stuff. The typewriter is as far as I went. ~ Walter Kaylin

Given that most movies are bad, and that there are whole categories and sub-categories of badness - the sequel, the Madonna Movie, the Friday 13th Series, or Movies Starring John Travolta Before Pulp Fiction - it is almost impossible to choose a single film for worst movie of all time. But strangely, I do have a nomination and I believe it is actually the worst movie ever made. It is Boxing Helena. The director is David Lynch's daughter, and the film comes with the almost insane-making faults that the family connection might imply. ~ Andrew O'Hagan

Bout time you got here," Keefe called as they crested a hill and entered a grassy meadow peppered with tiny blue flowers. "I was getting tired of stomping Fitz to a pulp in bramble."

"Only because you cheat!" Fitz shouted, tossing a red tri-pointed ball at Keefe.

Keefe caught it and whipped it back so fast Fitz had to dive to avoid being smacked in the face. Then the strange ball curved back like a boomerang and Keefe caught it one-handed. "Only losers play fair. Which is why I call Foster for my team today."

"Hey - why do you get her?" Fitz asked, ~ Shannon Messenger

Everything's interesting. You just have to look closely."
"And most people don't. ~ James Sallis

Once when Newton was away from his astronomical laboratory, he had returned to find that his little poodle dog Diamond had torn into shreds and eaten up part of his map showing distant star points. Perhaps God was punishing him for his neglect of God. He had picked up his poodle from its basket and had brushed its curls with his loving hand as he- not shouting in anger- had whispered serenely, consolingly, "Ah, little Diamond! Diamond! Thou dost not know the harm which thou hast done." Some corner of the universe had been made into pulp. He had left it so. ~ Marguerite Young

The cemetery watchman left the room and returned with a tray holding three small skulls and a large one. I could feel the short hairs on the back of my neck standing up of their own accord. None of them were real though; they were wood or celluloid imitations. They all had flaps that opened at the top; one was a jug and the other three steins.

The man behind the desk named the toast. 'To our Friend!' I thought he meant myself at first; he meant that shadowy enemy of all mankind, the Grim Reaper.

'We are called The Friends of Death,' he explained to me when the grisly containers had been emptied. 'To outline our creed and purpose briefly, it is this: That death is life, and life is death. We have mastered death, and no member of the Friends of Death need ever fear it. They 'die,' it is true, but after death they are buried in special graves in our private cemetery - graves having air vents, such as you discovered. Also, our graves are equipped with electric signals, so that after the bodies of our buried members begin to respond to the secret treatment our scientists have given them before internment, we are warned. Then we come and release them - and they live again. Moreover, they are released, freed of their thralldom; from then on death is an old familiar friend instead of an enemy. They no longer fear it. Do you not see what a wonderful boon this would be in your case, Brother Bud; you who have suffered so from that fear?' ("Graves For The Living") ~ Cornell Woolrich

'Pulp Fiction' is an amazing film, and I haven't made one nearly as good. ~ Martin McDonagh

Will you see Pulp again? Who knows. I'm not stoking those particular rumours. ~ Jarvis Cocker

I always loved the verve and vivacity of pulp and I kind of merged it with my own interest in family stories. ~ Daniel Woodrell

Those Zolofts make me so fucking hungry. I've gained 20 pounds – it's totally out of control."

George Hanson
In The Shadow of Sadd. ~ Steen Langstrup

These things matter. It's tedious, I know. Any writer worth his weight in pulp would by now have set the hero along a definable journey, or at least created some kind of goal against which to measure his progress as we move forward. I assure you, the foundation has been laid. Characters have been established and the scene is set. Dim the lights and let's dance. Who says I'm even the hero? Get off my fucking back. I'm no journalist, I'm a musician, for Christ's sake! Still, the ultimate truth, for our purposes anyway, whether these events are factual or not, is better revealed through the words I choose to describe them. I'd never cheat you of that. I only wish I could see through the back of the page as you make the connections. ~ Gordon Highland

Then he dreamed that he was in the open door of a plane several thousand feet above the earth and he had to jump holding a baby in his arms. It was his baby. He jumped, pulled the rip cord on the parachute, and it didn't open. The emergency release didn't work. He was falling fast. The wind tore at him fiercely. He was gripping the baby as tightly as he could but the wind pried under his arms, strained at his muscles, and suddenly the baby was loose, falling beside him, just out of reach. He flailed and groped in the air, trying to reach it. The baby was falling just a little bit faster than he was. It was below him, falling away from him as he fell after it. The earth screamed up at him. He knew that the baby was going to hit first and he would see it, would know it for a whole fraction of a second before he was smashed into a pulp himself. The terrible millisecond of that grief burst in him and he woke shrieking. He couldn't get the dream out of his head. He prayed that he would have the dream again but that this time he would fall faster and be allowed to die first. ~ Katherine Dunn

You look at John Travolta in 'Pulp Fiction', you look at Donnie Wahlberg in 'The Sixth Sense.' People have liens against them in crazy ways and the audience is always forgiving - if you prove it. ~ Seth Green

He told himself she wasn't really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when they wanted to be in the clear. ~ David Goodis

On a small square, wood is being cut for the city school. Cords of healthy, crisp timber are piled high and melt slowly, one log after another, under the saws and axes of workmen. Ah, timber, trustworthy, honest, true matter of reality, bright and completely decent, the embodiment of the decency and prose of life! However deep you look into its core, you cannot find anything that is not apparent on its evenly smiling surface, shining with that warm, assured glow of its fibrous pulp woven in a likeness of the human body. In each fresh section of a cut log a new face og the human body. In each fresh section of a cut log a new face appears, always smiling and golden. Oh, the strange complexion of timber, warm eithout exaltation, completely sound, fragrant, and pleasant! ~ Bruno Schulz

The sun was up, the room already too warm. Light filtered in through the net curtains, hanging suspended in the air, sediment in a pond. My head felt like a sack of pulp. Still in my nightgown, damp from some fright I'd pushed aside like foliage, I pulled myself up and out of my tangled bed, then forced myself through the usual dawn rituals - the ceremonies we perform to make ourselves look sane and acceptable to other people. The hair must be smoothed down after whatever apparitions have made it stand on end during the night, the expression of staring disbelief washed from the eyes. The teeth brushed, such as they are. God knows what bones I'd been gnawing in my sleep. ~ Margaret Atwood

He passed the dead in all their ranks, in all their spectral attitudes. Some lay supine, mouths open in attitudes of near ecstasy, one upon the next, embracing. Some had bowed their heads as if in deep meditation or prayer. Others had been ground to pulp against the concrete and conveyed no expression at all. ~ Laurence Gonzales

He was a young man of savage & unexpected originality, a diseased genius & quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane & in their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the madness of a man of genius some genius often remains: the form & not the quality of intelligence has been affected; the fruit has been bruised in the fall, but has preserved all its perfume & all the savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe. ~ Remy De Gourmont

Joe learned to view the comic book hero in his formfitting costume, not as a pulp absurdity but as a celebration of the lyricism of the naked (albeit tinted) human form in motion. It was not all violence and retribution in the early stories of Kavalier Clay; Joe's work also articulated the simple joy of unfettered movement, of the able body, in a way that captured the yearnings not only of his crippled cousin but of an entire generation of weaklings, stumblebums, and playground goats. ~ Michael Chabon

Sometimes things are just what they seem to be and that's all there is to it. ~ Charles Bukowski

Bosch had left Nigeria with his infamous Butcher Boys - assorted sizes, shapes and colors, but all killers for a price - when his scheme to take over a native village backfired. He had figured on cleaning up by selling the village girls in the Congo but found himself dodging spears, knives and related items of cutlery instead. ~ Walter Kaylin

It's not highly intellectual material. I'm dedicating it to the pulp fiction of the past. ~ Bruce Boxleitner

Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Story is the mechanism by which we live, express, understand, and evolve. Story is more than just equipment for living - it's life itself. When a culture's stories are honest, authentic, and connected to the truth, the culture is strong, productive, and progressive. When a culture's stories stagnate and become derivative, deceptive, shallow, and unconnected to the energy of life, the culture erodes, degrades, and eventually perishes (although the people may not realize they're dead!). Stories are the manner by which we extract meaning out of the fibrous pulp of our everyday lives. And meaning is the spiritual oxygen that allows our soul to breathe. Without stories, life has no meaning. Without meaning, we cannot live. ~ Derek Rydall

What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with Life. ~ Dashiell Hammett

Kandinski looked up. 'Do you read science fiction?' he asked matter-of-factly.
'Not as a rule,' Ward admitted. When Kandinski said nothing he went on: 'Perhaps I'm too skeptical, but I can't take it too seriously.'
Kandinski pulled at a blister on his palm. 'No one suggests you should. What you mean is that you take it too seriously.'
Accepting the rebuke with a smile at himself, Ward pulled out one of the magazines and sat down at a table next to Kandinski. On the cover was a placid suburban setting of snugly eaved houses, yew trees, and children's bicycles. Spreading slowly across the roof-tops was an enormous pulpy nightmare, blocking out the sun behind it and throwing a weird phosphorescent glow over the roofs and lawns. 'You're probably right,' Ward said, showing the cover to Kandinski. 'I'd hate to want to take that seriously.'
("The Venus Hunters") ~ J.G. Ballard

I work with pen and paper. That's my favorite way to write. I love the way the ink sinks into the wood, soaks into the wood pulp. There's something about that process that's so organic. ~ Tom Robbins

From the first she showed a curious sensitivity to what, I suppose, may be called the 'influences' of the place. She said it 'smelled' of ghosts and warlocks. ~ A. Merritt

I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, - tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books -- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles -- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn't about reading the words; it's about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-colour prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, or literary weight or unsolved mysteries. ~ Alix E. Harrow

The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin. ~ Cornell Woolrich

Several of the inventions and discoveries which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the breech-loading gun, india-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first appeared in Dickens's lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books. Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce's "invention" in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, "of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures," and it is also an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the "invention" is! ~ George Orwell

Our magazine shelves are filled with crime and sex pulp-magazines that are being read and devoured by millions of young people ...
Scores are seeing each week the trash that Hollywood produces. Truly our children are movie mad. ~ Billy Graham

Peeling an Orange

Between you and a bowl of oranges I lie nude
Reading The World's Illusion through my tears.
You reach across me hungry for global fruit,
Your bare arm hard, furry and warm on my belly.
Your fingers pry the skin of a naval orange
Releasing tiny explosions of spicy oil.
You place peeled disks of gold in a bizarre pattern
On my white body. Rearranging, you bend and bite
The disks to release further their eager scent.
I say "Stop, you're tickling," my eyes still on the page.
Aromas of groves arise. Through green leaves
Glow the lofty snows. Through red lips
Your white teeth close on a translucent segment.
Your face over my face eclipses The World's Illusion.
Pulp and juice pass into my mouth from your mouth.
We laugh against each other's lips. I hold my book
Behind your head, still reading, still weeping a little.
You say "Read on, I'm just an illusion," rolling
Over upon me soothingly, gently unmoving,
Smiling greenly through long lashes. And soon
I say "Don't stop. Don't disillusion me."
Snows melt. The mountain silvers into many a stream.
The oranges are golden worlds in a dark dream. ~ Virginia Adair

I was a free man, and I'd survived prison without being arse raped or beaten to a pulp.
So how come I felt so f**king sad? ~ Ozzy Osbourne

Studying the history of our ancestors is instructive. I understand some of my parents' struggles and sacrifices. I am acquainted with my grandparents and great grandparents' way of life. The common denominator that runs through their lifeblood is a hardpan of resiliency, courage, and work ethic. They also shared a phenomenal degree of competency essential to make due in an open land where the pioneering spirit meets nature under a big sky full of endless possibilities for triumph and setback. My forebears took care of their family members and tended their ancestral land before the word caretaker was a recognized term for a loving man, woman, or child. Self-reliant people who master the skills essential for survival in a harsh clime also value helping other people who are in a fix. All my predecessors were quick to lend a hand to a neighbor in need. Their ability to see life through the heart was the decisive feature of their pioneering pluck.

How we start a day, presages how the day shall unfold. Each day when I awaken, I feel clobbered by the preceding day. At days end, I feel comparable to a chewed on piece of masticated beef. I devote all available personal energy reserves to simply getting by and muss over how I can engender the energy to make it through today's pulp works. In reality, I go on because akin to every generation that preceded me and every generation that succeeds me, I must continue onward or I will expire. The one fact that keeps me going is the ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We had an abundance of mangoes, papaias and bananas here, but the pride of the islands, the most delicious fruit known to men, cherimoya, was not in season. It has a soft pulp, like a pawpaw, and is eaten with a spoon. ~ Mark Twain

And there's my poor endeavoring human desk at which I sit so often during the day, facing south, the papers and pencils and the coffee cup with sprigs of alpine fir and a weird orchid of the heights wiltable in one day– My Beechnut gum, my tobacco pouch, dusts, pitiful pulp magazines I have to read, view south to all those snowy majesties– The waiting is long.

On Starvation Ridge
little sticks
Are trying to grow. ~ Jack Kerouac

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless. ~ Bruce Sterling

After wasting so much pulp and ink myself, who was I to complain about waste? We live in an advanced capitalist society, after all. ~ Haruki Murakami

So begins their pursuit
of beauty: leaves tumble
into barrels of water and lye,
the green tears of plants
steamed to the clarity of human tears.

Then, the same women take up
Their pestles and pound the landscape
Into pulp. Mashing daylight and daydreams
into a pale cold mass.

Only then will the men come to drown
their fruits in water, dispersing
the remnants of plants and the aches
of tired white arms.

And having dispersed them, they redeem
with their fine-meshed nets the tissue
of emptiness we now call paper. ~ Ramon C. Sunico

Recalling, some time later, what I had felt at the time, I distinguished the impression of having been held for a moment in her mouth, myself, naked, without any of the social attributes which belonged equally to her other playmates and, when she used my surname, to my parents, accessories of which her lips - by the effort she made, a little after her father's manner, to articulate the words to which she wished to give a special emphasis - had the air of stripping, of divesting me, like the skin from a fruit of which one can swallow only the pulp, while her glance, adapting itself to the same new degree of intimacy as her speech, fell on me also more directly and testified to the consciousness, the pleasure, even the gratitude that it felt by accompanying itself with a smile. ~ Marcel Proust

Ruger's in there too. Hands covered in blood so they arrested him. He had to tackle your girl to get the gun away from her. She'd gone all Pulp Fiction on us, ready to defend you by killing all of us if she had to. Crouched over your body like Wonder Woman. Gives me a boner just thinking about it. ~ Joanna Wylde

His agility surprised Phoebe Ash. She saw the plaster cast on his right leg. Funny messages in ink - "Go break the left one, tiger!" - had been written on the off-white plaster. ~ Ed Lynskey

Pan and the Cherries

I RECOGNIZED him by his skips and hops,
And by his hair I knew that he was Pan.
Through sunny avenues he ran,
And leapt for cherries to the red tree-tops.
Upon his fleece were pearling water drops
Like little silver stars. How pure he was!

And this was when my spring was arched with blue.

Now, seeing a cherry of a smoother gloss,
He seized it, and bit the kernel from the pulp.
I watched him with great joy ... I came anigh ...
He spat the kernel straight into my eye.
I ran to kill Pan with my knife!
He stretched his arm out, swirled--
And the whole earth whirled!

Let us adore Pan, god of all the world! ~ Paul Fort

There was an enormous revival of pulp fiction that started in the '60s and continued into the '70s, which in large part gave rise to things like 'Star Wars' and 'Indiana Jones,' among others. But I developed an appetite for the original stuff at the time, and that appetite has never really abated. ~ Chris Roberson

What is this?" he whispered.
"Mangoes." My father always said mangoes with a Quillonian were a sure bet. I hadn't realized how much of a sure bet.
Orro licked the fruit again, looked at it, and suddenly bit into it, shredding the yellow pulp.
He'd wolfed down half a mango before he realized I was still there and froze, pieces of mango on his whiskers. "Don't see me. ~ Ilona Andrews

All efforts of reason and analysis are, in a word, like trying to slice through a watermelon with sewing needles. They may leave marks on the outer rind, but the fruity pulp will remain perpetually out of reach. ~ Haruki Murakami

She plucked a raspberry. Sweet juice, sweet pleasure. Within the tangle of tendrils, inside a blossom, a tiny bead was kisses and blessed by the sun, from which it took in light and warmth and heaven's rain imbued with the richness of the soil of France. All of the elements of the river world helped that bead to expand and multiply into sheer casings for sweet pulp, wedge together in a knobby globe until it released its juice in her mouth ~ Susan Vreeland

I think I was shown Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas at seven or eight. That's really bad. I think I've turned out all right; it didn't harm me too much. ~ Ed Speleers

Love was for dummies, soulmates were the creation of pulp-fiction writers; romance was craved by ageing, lonely cat owners. Successful relationships were built on rationality and compromise. ~ Karan Bajaj

Can a reasonable man ever truly question the nobility of the heat engine he calls his body? What option does he have but to heap praise on his form, to self-adore, to admire, and to hold it up as the greatest statement of beauty in a beautiful garden? What, though, is to be admired in such a frighteningly fragile machine; a perilously needy contraption laced with kilometres of liquid and electrical conduits prone to leaks, rot, clogs, and short-circuits? What is there to be proud of in a machine that has an eight hour battery life and is predetermined to spend half its existence in a defenceless, catatonic coma? What is to be revered in a mechanism let loose in a sealed off room where almost everything - including its single source of light and warmth - makes it sick, but whose immune system functions by late entry crisis-response imitation? Where is the awe in a contrivance that freezes and dies if placed a little over here, or overheats and dies if placed a little over there? Where is the wonder in an instrument that is crushed to a pulp if dropped a little down there, or boiled away to nothing if lifted a little up there? Where is the marvel in an appliance where three-quarters of the planet's surface will drown it, and three-quarters of the atmosphere will asphyxiate it? What is there to be cherished in a machine born innately greedy and so utterly useless that it has to wait three years for its neural networks to hook-up and come online before it even begins to get a hin ~ John Zande

When I was in Pulp, I actively did more TV stuff because that was during the Great Britpop Wars, and it seemed important to prove that indie people could speak. That war doesn't exist anymore. ~ Jarvis Cocker

There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks ... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them ... Decent people lost their jobs ... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system. ~ Raymond Chandler

They should build a monument," Cary said. "All the times I got my ass beat to a pulp so the youth of today could get dolled up like faggots to go out in public. ~ Nell Zink

I'm pounding and kicking him and I'm all me and I'm kicking and kicking into the face that's crying and begging for mercy, kicking, kicking ... only for real, for cold ice real, it's not my foot smashing his face to a pulp, but my stick smashing the puck into the board, and it's not him crying, but me. ~ Jerry Spinelli