Rotten Quotes

Outsong in the Jungle

[Baloo:] For the sake of him who showed
One wise Frog the Jungle-Road,
Keep the Law the Man-Pack make
For thy blind old Baloo's sake!
Clean or tainted, hot or stale,
Hold it as it were the Trail,
Through the day and through the night,
Questing neither left nor right.
For the sake of him who loves
Thee beyond all else that moves,
When thy Pack would make thee pain,
Say: "Tabaqui sings again."
When thy Pack would work thee ill,
Say: "Shere Khan is yet to kill."
When the knife is drawn to slay,
Keep the Law and go thy way.
(Root and honey, palm and spathe,
Guard a cub from harm and scathe!)

Wood and Water, Wind and Tree,
Jungle-Favour go with thee!

[Kaa:] Anger is the egg of Fear--
Only lidless eyes see clear.
Cobra-poison none may leech--
Even so with Cobra-speech.
Open talk shall call to thee
Strength, whose mate is Courtesy.
Send no lunge beyond thy length.
Lend no rotten bough thy strength.
Gauge thy gape with buck or goat,
Lest thine eye should choke thy throat.
After gorging, wouldst thou sleep ?
Look thy den be hid and deep,
Lest a wrong, by thee forgot,
Draw thy killer to the spot.
East and West and North and South,
Wash thy hide and close thy mouth.
(Pit and rift and blue pool-brim,
Middle-Jungle follow him!)

Wood and Water, W ~ Rudyard Kipling

I WILL SKULL-FUCK EVERY ONE OF YOU CANNIBAL-COCKSUCKERS!!! I WILL RIP EVERY STINKING HEAD OFF EVERY FUCKING ONE OF YOU AND SHIT DOWN YOUR ROTTEN FUCKING NECKS ~ Robert Kirkman

Education must be taken out of the hands of rich illiterates, third rate politicians, and put where it belongs: in the care of scholars. At present the whole University system is rotten to the core, and an appalling waste of time, energy and money ... ~ Katherine Anne Porter

Dear Mr. Chance and Ms. Brattle. Sorry about the mess. Great bed. Loved it. As a matter of fact, loved the whole house. Actually, I tried to kill your kids when I found them here. Yeah, funny story. Maybe not funny, hah hah.'"
Astrid heard nervous laughter from the media people, or maybe just from the hotel staff who were hovering around the edges grabbing a glimpse of the Hollywood royalty.
"'Anyway, I missed and they got away. I don't know what will happen to Sanjit and that stick-up-his butt Choo and the rest, but whatever happens next, it's not on me. However . . .'"
Astrid took a dramatic pause.
"'However, the rest of what happened was on me. Me, Caine Soren. You'll probably be hearing a lot of crazy stories from kids. But what they didn't know was that it was all me. Me. Me me. See, I had a power I never told anyone about. I had the power to make people do bad things. Crimes and whatnot. Especially Diana, who never did anything wrong on her own, by her own will, I mean. She - and the rest of them - were under my control. The responsibility is on me. I confess. Haul me away, officers.'"
Astrid suddenly felt her throat tightening, although she'd read the letter many times already, and knew what it said. Rotten son of a . . . And then this.
Redemption. Not a bad concept.
Well, partial redemption.
"It's signed Caine Soren. And below that, 'King of the FAYZ.'"
It was a full confession. A lie: a blatant, not-very-convincing lie. Bu ~ Michael Grant

Falsehood is difficult to be maintained. When the materials of a building are solid blocks of stone, very rude architecture will suffice; but a structure of rotten materials needs the most careful adjustment to make it stand at all. ~ Richard Whately

Can you tell me what happened, Libbs? Can you tell me what has you so panicked?"

"All of it." That was my answer, even though I knew my dad was expecting something more specific. "Everything. It was you. Me. Aneurysms. Death. Cancer. Murder. Crime. Mean people. Rotten people. Two-faced people. Bullies. Natural disasters. The world has me panicked. The world did this. Especially the way it gives you people to love and then takes them away." But the answer was actually simple. I had decided to be afraid. ~ Jennifer Niven

I nearly die of fear before I go on stage. Something wicked. I can't eat a thing the day before a gig. ~ John Lydon

We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc.

That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.' ... And so on.

But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time. ...

Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker.

It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions). ~ Gregory Bateson

When I started out, everyone seemed to be adopting these names ... Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious. I wasn't really Rotten or Vicious or Nasty, so I wanted something a bit more funny - yet something that seemed real rock 'n' roll ... something that acknowledged my ambition. ~ Billy Idol

Once upon a time there was a poor child with no father and no mother everything was dead
and no one was left in the whole world.
Everything was dead
and it went and searched day and night And since nobody was left on the earth it wanted to go up to the heavens and the moon was looking at it so friendly and when it finally got to the moon the moon was a piece of rotten wood and then it went to the sun and when it got there the sun was a wilted sunflower and when it got to the stars they were little golden flies stuck up there
like the shrike sticks 'em on the blackthorn and when it wanted to go back down to earth the earth was an overturned piss pot! and was all alone. ~ Georg Buchner

Europe is not old; it's rotten. Most Europeans are ignorant, racist, greedy and lazy. ~ Daniel Marques

What the hell is this stuff?" he muttered, frowning at the oily spot on the linen cloth. "Pearlman slathered it on me this morning."
"It's macassar oil. Gentlemen use it to keep their hair neat. Nicholas used it," she added pointedly.
"Well, tomorrow he's giving it up. I smell like a rotten apple."
"You do not. And I think it looks rather nice."
He sent her an incredulous look. "I look like an otter. And everything I put my head against gets greasy."
"That's why someone invented the antimacassar," she told him, almost smiling.
"The-aha!" He laughed as he made the connection. "Of course. First they invent something stupid, then something ugly to make up for it. We live in a wondrous age, Annie. ~ Patricia Gaffney

Gold can gild a rotten stick, and dirt sully an ingot. ~ Philip Sidney

I look at the sky and the dust that separates us from the stars that will be my home. I breathe in the night air, the rotten night air, and I miss,
I miss,
I miss. ~ Corinne Duyvis

How often has not the parallel been drawn and the golden age of the Roman Empire, when the external brilliancy of life likewise dazzled the eye, notwithstanding that the social diagnosis could yield no other verdict than 'rotten to the very core'? ~ Abraham Kuyper

Although he was at core a rotten being, no one could fault him for style. ~ Ellen Kushner

I always say that bad women are fewer than men, but when you get one, they're fascinating because they're so rotten. ~ Ann Rule

Most people think Marv is crazy, but I don't believe that.
I'm no shrink and I'm not saying I've got Marv all figured out or anything, but "crazy" just doesn't explain him. Not to me. Sometimes I think he's retarded, a big, brutal kid who never learned the ground rules about how people are supposed to act around each other. But that doesn't have the right ring to it either. No, it's more like there's nothing wrong with Marv, nothing at all
except that he had the rotten luck of being born at the wrong time in history. He'd have been okay if he'd been born a couple of thousand years ago. He'd be right at home on some ancient battlefield, swinging an ax into somebody's face. Or in a roman arena, taking a sword to other gladiators like him.
They'd have tossed him girls like Nancy, back then. ~ Frank Miller

Of the few who were not afraid to witness the burial of a witch and who had gone to the cemetery, some had come just to verify her being put away but stayed to sing 'Shall We Gather at the River' for politeness' sake, quite unaware of the bleak promise of their song. Others came to see that nothing go awry, that the shallow-minded and small-hearted kept their meanness at bay, and that the entire event be characterized by that abiding gentleness of spirit to which they themselves had arrived by the simple determination not to let anything--anything at all: not failed crops, not rednecks, lost jobs, sick children, rotten potatoes, broken pipes, bug-ridden flour, third-class coal, educated social workers, thieving insurance men, garlic-ridden hunkies, corrupt Catholics, racist Protestants, cowardly Jews, slaveholding Moslems, jack-leg nigger preachers, squeamish Chinamen, cholera, dropsy or the Black Plague, let alone a strange woman--keep them from their God. ~ Toni Morrison

Why Does He Do That?
That's the number one question, isn't it? Maybe it's his drinking, you say. Maybe it's his learning disabilities. It's his job; he hates it. He's stressed. I think he's bipolar. It's his mother's fault; she spoiled him rotten. It's the drugs. If only he didn't use. It's his temper. He's selfish. It's the pornography; he's obsessed.
The list could go on and on. You could spend many years trying to pinpoint it and never get a definite answer. The fact is, many people have these problems and they aren't abusive. Just because someone is an alcoholic doesn't mean he is abusive. Men hate their jobs all the time and aren't abusive. Bipolar? Okay. Stressed? Who isn't! Do you see where I am going with this?
Off the subject a bit, when someone commits a violent crime, they always report in the news about his possible motive. As human beings, we need to somehow make sense of things. If someone murders someone, do you think it makes the family of the victim feel better to know the murderer's motive? No. Except for self-defense, there really is no excuse for murder. Motive, if there is any, is irrelevant.
The same is true of abuse. You could spend your whole life going round and round trying to figure out why. The truth is, the why doesn't matter. There are only two reasons why men commit abuse - because they want to do so and because they can.
You want to know why. In many ways, you might feel like you need to know. But, if you could com ~ Beth Praed

The wolves of war are gathering. They sing a song of rotten bones. ~ Ryan Graudin

Delusions, errors and lies are like huge, gaudy vessels, the rafters of which are rotten and worm-eaten, and those who embark in them are fated to be shipwrecked. ~ Gautama Buddha

It's a rotten job, but somebody's got to do it. ~ Agatha Christie

On my fifteenth birthday, I came to realize that the expression spoiled rotten meant exactly that. We kids were the apples of our parents' eyes, and I, for one, was rotting from inside out. ~ Neal Shusterman

We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something and turned around. 'They're a rotten crowd,' I shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.' I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It's rotten, okay? And once something's rotten, it can never be good again. ~ Brad Meltzer

Look, the reason is security, a subconscious need for security. I had a rotten childhood. Two bottles at once fills a void that needs filling. Maybe. I'm not sure. ~ Charles Bukowski

It's supposed to be raining Thank Yous on Thursday, after an ingratitude draught. Also, you'd better enjoy my love while it's fresh, before it goes rotten and I have to sell it to McDonald's as chicken filler. ~ Jarod Kintz

Well, we learned a vital lesson here today, me mateys. You canna keelhaul a demon no matter how hard you try for it. The rotten crafty beastie bastard won't be having none of it. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Happy, no. I'm unhappy because I feel myself a victim of people's rotten tricks. It's not fair and I'll say it. And I'll die saying I was unfairly treated. I've been stripped, robbed, looted, mucked up, insulted from all directions, by people who don't deserve anything. Here is exactly what I think, and I haven't any inferiority or guilt complexes towards anyone. I feel all others are guilty, not me. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

Gone Groupy, has she?' said Hugh. 'How rotten for Tom!' 'Well, it is rather, because Connie's started forgiving him for all sorts of things he never knew he'd done. We're hoping that she'll get over it quickly, because she's president of the Women's Conservative Association, besides running the Mothers, and the Village Club, and now that she's a God-guided citizen she simply hasn't a moment to attend to Good Works. I don't know why it is, but when people get Changed they never seem to be as nice as they were before. ~ Georgette Heyer

Ah Fate, cannot a man Be wise without a beard? East, West, from Beer to Dan, Say, was it never heard That wisdom might in youth be gotten, Or wit be ripe before 't was rotten? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs ... and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy. ~ Walter Benjamin

I didn't die. I never died. I'm not dead. OK, I feel pretty rotten about the whole situation- the way I disappeared that night without saying where I eas going and how everyone assumed I really was dead, and the way I let them believe it.
Things had gotten on top of me. It was because of this whole sequence of events that made me want to cycle down to the shore and tumble into the black sea. ~ Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

You bitch,' he said. 'You rich bitch. That's poetry. I'm full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

I cozied an apple in my hand and tried the weight of it against my palm, contemplating whether or not beaning a judge with half-rotten fruit would qualify as contempt of the court. Quite probably. ~ Rachel Heffington

I have been made redundant before and it is a terrible blow; redundant is a rotten word because it makes you think you are useless. ~ Billy Connolly

We've had enough exhortations to be silent. Cry out with a thousand tongues - I see the world is rotten because of silence. ~ Catherine Of Siena

I won't say that we couldn't get along without you - we can. I won't beg you to stay here for our sake - I didn't think I'd ever revert to that rotten old plea, but, boy! - what a temptation it was, I can almost see why people do it. I ~ Ayn Rand

You got a girl who's worth it ... you spoil her rotten. You let her know she's precious, not convince her of that shit, because it's not about convincing. It's about understanding it's just fuckin' true. ~ Kristen Ashley

Man is/the symbol-using (symbol making, symbol-misusing) animal/inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)/separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making/goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)/and rotten with perfection. ~ Kenneth Burke

Kindness is a rotten fruit that poisons anyone who partakes of it. Throw it in the face of your enemies and let it ruin them instead. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Just spunk won't be enough; you've got to have gumption. You've got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice. You've got to keep your mind off of pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of howl about it. You've got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they've come through it and you can too. You'll bear it because there isn't any choice
except to go to pieces ... It's kind of a test, Mary, and it's the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens. Then you have your choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That's all. ~ James Agee

I knew that one of my sharpest memories of sixth grade was forever doomed to be that moment - sitting there with the overwhelming odor of rotten eggs, spaghetti, manure, dead dog, wet schoolbags, smelly socks, and the girly perfume of Amy Bellini's shampoo … all filling my nostrils. ~ Ferguson Fartworthy

Time spoils quickly in here, and it smells like rotten meat. Every day adds a little more weight, barely noticeable at first, but eventually it will crush you to death. In this place your life can be measured by how long you can keep fighting. The ghouls can sense it if you have any life behind your eyes, and they move in to extinguish it. The guards, the prisoners, the administration - the energy spirals downward forever, creating a hellish staircase that leads nowhere. The most frightening part is how they're all too thick to realize what they're doing. They seem to believe that if they keep digging in the same hole, they'll eventually reach heaven. ~ Damien Echols

The party was at its peak and everyone was taking full advantage of the moment. Each lady had her eye on a certain marked beau. Elegant women conversed with eligible men, handsome and well bred. Ruby felt sorry for the under-endowed ladies and plain girls, who stood together in a small group with their mothers. Passing by the conniving little circle, she heard too clearly the strategies they had concocted. They were like vultures hunting for rotten meat. Mothers sent out their girls to meet the wealthiest and nearly deceased men of the ton. ~ Jettie Necole

The disaster at the Chernobyl plant, along with the war in Afghanistan and the cruise-missile question, is generally seen today as the start of the decline of the Soviet Union. Just as the great famine of 1891 had mercilessly laid bare the failure of czarism, almost a century later Chernobyl clearly showed how divided, rigid and rotten the Soviet regime had become. The principal policy instruments, secrecy and repression, no longer worked in a modern world with its accompanying means of communication. The credibility of the party leadership sank to the point at which it could sink no further. In the early hours of 26 April, 1986, two explosions took place in one of the four reactors at the giant nuclear complex. It was an accident of the kind scientists and environmental activists had been warning about for years, particularly because of its effects: a monstrous emission of iodine-131 and caesium-137. Huge radioactive clouds drifted across half of Europe: ~ Geert Mak

I have no use for your body, for within its youth lies a rotten wench already deceased. ~ Keisha Keenleyside

We have all of us got it jumbled up. You never feel so grown up as when you are eleven, and never so young and unsure as when you are forty. That is why time is a rotten jokester and no one ought to let him in to dinner. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Try to remember this: what you project Is what you will perceive; what you perceive With any passion, be it love or terror, May take on whims and powers of its own. Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection Will serve you best - unless you overdo it, Watching your step too narrowly, refusing To specify a world, shrinking your purview To a tight vision of your inching shoes, Which may, as soon as you come to think, be crossing An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle. ~ Richard Wilbur

They are so damn 'intellectual' and rotten that I can't stand them anymore ... I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those 'artistic' bitches of Paris. ~ Frida Kahlo

He acts like he's in one of those Hollywood movies where after spending a couple of weeks with the natives in a remote Amazonian village, the white explorer is already debating the nature of the universe with the Chief in passable lingo. Except that in the movie, he ends up shagging the prize virgin whose body looks as if the jungle is really just a spa. What he doesn't know is that ten years down the road, she will wind up looking like all the other women in the village: saggy tits, rotten teeth, and about as supple as a mother of eight can be. ~ Sorin Suciu

Suppose [a person] had a basket full of apples and, being worried that some of the apples were rotten, wanted to take out the rotten ones to prevent the rot spreading. How would he proceed? Would he not begin by tipping the whole lot out of the basket? And would not the next step be to cast his eye over each apple in turn, and pick up and put back in the basket only those he saw to be sound, leaving the others? In just the same way, those who have never philosophized correctly have various opinions in their minds which they have begun to store up since childhood, and which they therefore have reason to believe may in many cases be false. They then attempt to separate the false beliefs from the others, so as to prevent their contaminating the rest and making the whole lot uncertain. Now the best way they can accomplish this is to reject all their beliefs together in one go, as if they were all uncertain and false. They can then go over each belief in turn and re-adopt only those which they recognize to be true and indubitable. ~ Rene Descartes

The gigantic intellect, the envious temper, the ravenous ambition and the rotten heart of Daniel Webster. ~ John Quincy Adams

I'm surprised when I walk right into yet another abandoned hunters' camp. Tattered plastic sheeting still hangs askew here and there. Blackened aerosol cans of Cheez Whiz sit in the fire pit, which sits in the middle of the trail. Assorted Styro-ware. Rotten leather boots. Where are these people? Are they back in civilization now, appearing to all observers to be as normal as pie, but inwardly ticking like time bombs and spreading their hot poisonous seed through the world like black-breathed plague? ~ Rick Bass

How does she do it? She makes it sound like she is so cut up to be giving them this information, and it's all just bumph out of her head. She never told them ANYTHING. I don't think she's given them the right name of any airfield in Britain except Mainsend and Buscot, which of course were where she was stationed. They could have easily checked. It's all so close to truth, and so glib
her aircraft identification is rather good considering what a fuss she makes about it. It makes me think of the first day I met her, giving those directions in German. So cool and crisp, such authority
suddenly she really was a radio operator, a German radio operator, she was so good at faking it. Or when I told her to be Jamie, how she just suddenly turned into Jamie.
This confession of hers is rotten with error ... ~ Elizabeth Wein

I was mortified that I could spend a lifetime with someone and not know them at all - that I could love someone so blindly and never question who they really were. Was it stupidity? Or is that merely what love actually is - to see the good, to love the good and wonderful and ignore the rest? I think that is what I used to believe…I don't believe that anymore.

Love is seeing every damn rotten thing about someone and loving them anyway. It's not being too afraid to look deep inside another person and still being able to see all the good messed up in with the bad. Love is accepting the shit as well as the roses. I think I failed to ever smell the bullshit. I only smelled the roses and never realized that it is the shit that makes the roses bloom. ~ Monika Basile

But to Fitz she'd always be invisible. An impossible task of face and body for which he had yet to conquer. And should he somehow manage to crack her open like rotten fruit on the vine, he'd only find decay and ugliness, from which she had to assume he'd run. Damaged goods were damaged goods. ~ L. Donsky-Levine

the most general condition for guilt-free massacre is the denial of humanity to the victim. You call the victims names like gooks, dinks, niggers, pinkos, and jags. The more you can get high officials in government to use these names and others like yellow dwarfs with daggers and rotten apples, the more your success.... If contact is allowed, or it cannot be prevented, you indicate the contact is not between equals; you talk about the disadvantaged, the deprived. Troy Duster, "Conditions for Guilt-Free Massacre" (1971) ~ Brendan C. Lindsay

He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country. ~ Raymond Chandler

The strangest think I have learned is that it's impossible to know what's inside someone. The wizards didn't teach me this, but I have learned it myself. Those who appear tall and straight and very good are sometimes rotten on the inside, and others, huge and clawed and apparently very bad, sometimes contain a pure and sweet form of goodness. The biggest trap is to judge a person by their outer casing. Their skin. Their hair. Their snow-white feathers. ~ Karen Foxlee

I think of bad news as a huge bird, with the wings of a crow and the face of my Grade Four school teacher, sparse bun, rancid teeth, wrinkly frown, pursed mouth and all, sailing around the world under cover of darkness pleased to be the bearer of ill tidings, carrying a basket of rotten eggs, and knowing- as the sun comes up- exactly where to drop them. On me, for one. ~ Margaret Atwood

Stop it," came Eustace's voice, squeaky with fright and bad temper. "It's some silly trick you two are playing. Stop it. I'll tell Alberta--Ow!"
The other two were much more accustomed to adventures, but, just exactly as Eustace Clarence said "Ow," they both said "Ow" too. The reason was that a great cold, salt splash had broken right out of the frame and they were breathless from the smack of it, besides being wet through.
"I'll smash the rotten thing," cried Eustace; and then several things happened at the same time. Eustace rushed toward the picture. Edmund, who knew something about magic, sprang after him, warning him to look out and not to be a fool. Lucy grabbed at him from the other side and was dragged forward. And by this time either they had grown much smaller or the picture had grown bigger. Eustace jumped to try to pull it off the wall and found himself standing on the frame; in front of him was not glass but real sea, and wind and waves rushing up to the frame as they might to a rock. He lost his head and clutched at the other two who had jumped up beside him. There was a second of struggling and shouting, and just as they thought they had got their balance a great blue roller surged up round them, swept them off their feet, and drew them down into the sea. Eustace's despairing cry suddenly ended as the water got into his mouth.
Lucy thanked her stars that she had worked hard at her swimming last summer term. It is true that she would have got on m ~ C.S. Lewis

He caught the first man in the back of the knee before they even knew he was there, and the heavy axehead split flesh and bone like rotten wood. Logs that bleed, Tyrion thought inanely as the second man came for him. Tyrion ducked under his sword, lashed out with the axe, the man reeled backward ... and Catelyn Stark stepped up behind him and opened his throat. The horseman remembered an urgent engagement elsewhere and galloped off suddenly. ~ George R R Martin

I prefer to remake flops. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a remake of a flop, and The Quiet American is a remake of a flop. ~ Michael Caine

A rotten ship is not afraid of the storms! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten. ~ Ezra Pound

The air down here doesn't smell of sugar and coffee. It smells damp, rotten. ~ Danielle Vega

You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty! ~ William Shakespeare

The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls ... Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Technically perfect, pictorially rotten. (Stieglitz's standard comment on photographs he rejected for publication in The American Amateur Photographer.) ~ Alfred Stieglitz

A man both handsome and repulsive in equal measure-as if his good looks were plastered over a rotten centre, a hero's face with a henchman's heart. ~ Tom Rob Smith

Finally, the lock clicked and she tugged the secret door open. A rotten stench hit her like a fist. She drew away. The boy at her side recoiled, afraid. Sarah fell to her knees. Sarah could not speak, she could only quiver, her fingers covering her eyes, her nose, blocking out the smell ... She sank to her knees again and she screamed at the top of her lungs, she screamed, for her mother, for her father, screamed for Michel. ~ Tatiana De Rosnay

I only became aware that my eyes had filled with tears when I noticed some commotion in the treetops, far off outside the perimeter wall. I blinked and looked again. There were monkeys out there fighting, screaming and pelting one another with rotten fruit. ~ Kage Baker

Men judge of Christians by taking as fair samples those that lie rotten on the ground. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

I think maybe what happened was the convenience of technology overshadowed the experience of holding an album in your hands, and sitting on your bedroom floor, and staring at a picture of John Lennon or Gene Simmons or Johnny Rotten. That tangible experience can sometimes become an even more emotional experience, because it's really happening. ~ Dave Grohl

Just take it from me," Donovan said. "Stay well clear of the warden. Some here think he's the devil. I don't, I don't believe in that religious talk, but I know evil when I see it. He's something rotten they dragged from the bowels of the earth, something they patched together from darkness and filth. He'll be the death of us all, every single one of us here in Furnace. Only question is when."
"I know one thing," I added. "The warden certainly brings out peoples dramatic sides."
Zee and Donovan both laughed through their noses. ~ Alexander Gordon Smith

Lemme take your picture! You fucking bok gwai low got a face carved out of rotten potato cured in dogshit, runover with a towtruck driven by Hellen Keller in a puke fit on pills ... ~ Frank Chin

I'm so glad to be grouped with the men you've seen in rotten shape. My hope is that someday I will reach the pinnacle of that appalling list. ~ Ginn Hale

Setting down her own basket, Annabelle held a pin between her thumb and forefinger, and closed her eyes. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, she always made the same wish…to marry a peer. Strangely, however, a new thought entered her head, just as she cast the pin into the well.
I wish I could fall in love.
Surprised by the wilful, wayward notion, Annabelle wondered how it was that she could have wasted a wish on something that was obviously so ill-advised. Opening her eyes, Annabelle saw that the other wallflowers were staring into the well with great solemnity. "I made the wrong wish," she said fretfully. "Can I have another?"
"No," Lillian said in a matter-of-fact tone. "Once you've thrown in your pin, it's done."
"But I didn't mean to make that particular wish," Annabelle protested. "Something just popped into my head, and it wasn't at all what I had planned."
"Don't argue, Annabelle," Evie advised. "You d-don't want to annoy the well spirit."
"The what?"
Evie smiled at her perplexed expression. "The resident spirit of the well. He's the one to whom y-you make a petition. But if you annoy him, he may decide to demand a terrible price for granting your wish. Or he may drag you into the well with him, to live there forever as his c-consort."
Annabelle stared into the brown water. She cupped her hands around the sides of her mouth to help direct her voice. "You don't have to grant my rotten wish," she told the unseen spi ~ Lisa Kleypas

This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality's brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles. ~ William T. Vollmann

What a feat, she thinks, to want to marry every woman he fucks. He is so good at being in love that Ernest Hemingway makes a rotten husband. ~ Naomi Wood

Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost ~ Thomas Merton

It didn't seem to matter that Reagan made his heartfelt endorsements of traditional family values despite being divorced and so alienated from his own children that one of them would write a book about what a rotten father he had been; by the same token, the president's failure to have made regular or even occasional visits to church hardly dimmed his appeal for the resurgent religious right ~ Douglas Brinkley

I love your hair!" Marlee gushed. "I wish I'd been born with red hair. It makes you look so alive. I hear that people with red hair have bed tempers. Is that true?
Despite my rotten day, Marlee's manner was so vivacious that my smile grew wider. "I don't think so. I mean, I can have a bad temper at times, but my sister is a redhead, and she's as sweet as can be. ~ Kiera Cass

Well, there's just some universal truths in a way that I've just observed to be true. You read Voltaire. You read modern literature. Anywhere you go, there's these observations about romantic love and what it does people, and these rotten feelings that rarely are people meaning to do that to each other. ~ Feist

I wouldn't wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface. If you were not at the receiving end of this mayhem you could be unaware of it. ~ Derek Jarman

Anything else, Your Majesty?"
"I didn't say my prayers."
"I'll say them for you. Our father who art in et cetera, bless all the rotten cousins and kill Jenny. Amen. ~ Maggie Osborne

MARSYAS: Beware!
Easily trips the big word "dare."
Each man's an Œdipus, that thinks
He hath the four powers of the Sphinx,
Will, Courage, Knowledge, Silence. Son,
Even the adepts scarce win to one!
The Thoughts - they fall like rotten fruits.
But to destroy the power that makes
These thoughts - thy Self? A man it takes
To tear his soul up by the roots!
This is the mandrake fable, boy! ~ Aleister Crowley

You've got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice. You've got to keep your mind off pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of a howl about it. You've got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they've come through it and that you will too. ~ James Agee

If thou trusteth to the book called the Scriptures, thou trusteth to the rotten staff of fables and falsehood. ~ Thomas Paine

I can't love him. I don't. This feeling is not the selfish, grasping need that I've seen tear apart my family, writhing through heir hearts like worms through rotten apples. ~ Rosamund Hodge

The music began, passages of immense technical complexity fluidly bridging Caravaggio's chiaroscuro with Renoir's impressionism. The gloom and shadows of claustrophobic chambers contrasting with the vibrant radiance of a wide-open landscape. The realism of humanity down to its dirty nails and rotten wounds combined with the fleeting sanguinity of the moment. ~ Ella Leya

We're both drowning
in our rotten shells.
I look to you for comfort,
but your hand is already pushing my head down. ~ Cristina Isabel

Face Book is a tutti - frutti garden. There are all the kinds of fruits here, bitter or sweet, tasteless or sour taste, fresh or rotten fruits, all together mixed in....sweet harmony! ~ Dina Stylianou

Everyone things children are sweet as Necco Wafers, but I've lived long enough to know the truth: kids are rotten. The only difference between grown-ups and kids is that grown-ups go to jail for murder. Kids get away with it. ~ Jennifer L. Holm

We're not doing maths again?' Harriet lamented.
Lord Winstead looked at Anne with unconcealed curiosity. 'Mathematics? On Rotten Row?'
'We have been studying measurement,' she informed him. 'They have already measured the average length of their strides. Now they will count their steps and compute the length of the path.'
'Very nice,' he said approvingly. 'And it keeps them busy and quiet as they count.'
'You have not heard them count,' Anne told him. ~ Julia Quinn

You start into it, inflamed by an idea, full of hope, full indeed of confidence. If you are properly modest, you will never write it at all, so there has to be one delicious moment when you have thought of something, know just how you are going to write it, rush for a pencil, and start buoyed up with exaltation. You then get into difficulties, don't see your way out, and finally manage to accomplish more or less what you first meant to accomplish, though losing confidence all the time. Having finished it, you know it is absolutely rotten. A couple of months later, you wonder if it may not be all right after all. ~ Agatha Christie

Here a few poor and stunted flowers stood with drooping heads, like a convent of consumptive girls, waiting for a ray of sunlight to dry out their leaves already half-rotten with the damp. ~ Theophile Gautier

Sometimes I wonder if it's even Dorothy's fault., or if this place was just rotten from the start, underneath everything. If maybe that's the price you pay for magic. ~ Danielle Paige