The Crack Up Quotes

As for breaking up, once the relationship is over, you never really know what went wrong; you just feel nauseous whenever the subject comes to mind. After a plane crash there's the black box that tells the FAA what caused the crack-up. Too bad there's no black box of relationships. ~ Linda Sunshine

Dying wasn't the joke, it was the punchline, the final guffaw, the crack-up, when your listeners' eyes should be streaming and your woman pees in her pants with laughing. You had to live with sufficient panache that the punchline worked. ~ Jane Messer

Lots of talk lately about the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL that seems to be exclusively masculine. And how many of the characters in the GENIUS BOOKS are likable? Is Holden Caulfield likable? Is Meursault in The Stranger? Is Henry Miller? Is any character in any of these system novels particularly likable? Aren't they usually loathsome but human, etc., loathsome and neurotic and obsessed? In my memory, all the characters in Jonathan Franzen are total douchebags (I know, I know, I'm not supposed to use that, feminine imagery, whatever, but it is SO satisfying to say and think). How about female characters in the genius books? Was Madame Bovary likable? Was Anna Karenina? Is Daisy Buchanan likable? Is Daisy Miller? Is it the specific way in which supposed readers HATE unlikable female characters (who are too depressed, too crazy, too vain, too self-involved, too bored, too boring), that mirrors the specific way in which people HATE unlikable girls and women for the same qualities? We do not allow, really, the notion of the antiheroine, as penned by women, because we confuse the autobiographical, and we pass judgment on the female author for her terrible self-involved and indulgent life. We do not hate Scott Fitzgerald in "The Crack-Up" or Georges Bataille in Guilty for being drunken and totally wading in their own pathos, but Jean Rhys is too much of a victim. ~ Kate Zambreno

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter - as indissolubly as if they were conceived together ... . - The Crack-Up ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Isn't Hollywood a dump - in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Keep a copy of 'Islands in the Stream' by Ernest Hemingway on the left hand side of your desk. Keep Fitzgerald's 'The Crack Up' on the right. When you get stuck, pick them up and pretend that they are having a fight, like you used to do with your GI Joes. ~ Lynn Coady

I got a smile that'll make the mirror crack,
And I seem to stay under clouds that's pitch black.
So when it rains, it pours, and when it pours, I'm soaked.
I contracted lung cancer from third hand smoke,
And I'm like the frog that's dying to be a prince,
The boy who cried wolf and no one was convinced.
The man who hit lotto and lost his ticket,
In a rainstorm ... and struck by lightning trying to get it. ~ GZA

we steady thud of wind with lungs that empty moon, fill it back up with shine, feed my feet to pig iron anklets biting flesh where i am link. i will break. bleed, crack. shatter. crush.
i'ma smash outta this choir, come up gasping new breath, my name burned clean, made mine ~ Tyehimba Jess

When a house is tottering to its fall,
The strain lies heaviest on the weakest part,
One tiny crack throughout the structure spreads,
And its own weight soon brings it toppling down. ~ Ovid

Beckett, would you do me a favor? For my wedding?" Livia asked suddenly.
He nodded. "You know I'll do whatever you ask."
She looked over her shoulder and back to his face. "In a minute I'm going to faint away from lack of food. When I wake up, I would appreciate it if you were miles away on Eve's bike."
"You're going to crack your fucking head trying to pull a stunt like that." He ran his hand through his hair. "And I gave your dad my word. I don't want him to think that was all a ploy."
"You said anything. Come on, big guy, give me what I want." She looked at him hopefully. "I'll explain it all to my dad later. I promise."
Beckett leaned down and kissed her cheek. "Fine. You take good care of my brother. Tell them both I said goodbye. I can't do it. I'm a pussy. ~ Debra Anastasia

No one asks how or what I am doing. They could not care less. We're all looking glasses, we girls, existing only to reflect their images back to them as they'd like to be seen. Hollow vessels of girls to be rinsed of our own ambitions, wants, and opinions, just waiting to be filled with the cool, tepid water of gracious compliance.
A fissure forms in the vessel. I'm cracking open. ~ Libba Bray

Silence!" Korbolo snapped. He eyed Duiker. "You are the historian who rode with Coltaine."

The historian faced him. "I am."

"You are a soldier."

"As you say."

"I do, and so you shall die with these soldiers, in a manner no different-"

"You mean to slaughter ten thousand unarmed men and women, Korbolo Dom?"

"I mean to cripple Tavore before she even sets foot on this continent. I mean to make her too furious to think. I mean to crack that façade so she dreams of vengeance day and night, poisoning her every decision."

"You always fashioned yourself as the Empire's harshest Fist, didn't you, Korbolo Dom? As if cruelty's a virtue… ~ Steven Erikson

Icy people often freeze themselves in order to hold in check a volcanic stew of disturbing and conflictual feelings. Emotional hibernation, if you will. Crack the ice and the stuff inside comes pouring out with all the discipline of molten lava. ~ Jonathan Kellerman

But there is another thing about midnight. It is when illusions break. When you can see the truth beneath them, if you are looking. There is always a crack in the illusion, a gap in the perfection, even if it is only visible with the ticking of a clock. Midnight is when you look, if there is a truth you need to see. If you are brave enough to bear what you witness. ~ Kat Howard

I love people with strong convictions, because we are living in a very PC world. You can't crack a joke without it being in the headlines. ~ Imelda May

When I just write something, it's usually because I love it, I love the material, but I feel like I really need a creative partner to crack it. And I certainly need and have a lot of creative partners as a director. ~ Nicholas Stoller

It means," said Aslan, "that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward. And now - ~ C.S. Lewis

Let's see that wrist."
I held it out, and Chase's jaw tightened.
"Look at that!" the medic shouted, staring over my shoulder behind us. The moment I turned my head he grabbed my hand and jerked it toward him, hard.
A crack as the bones in my wrist realigned. ~ Kristen Simmons

If you crack a joke right now I swear I will knee you in the junk. ~ Laura Kaye

TO my quick ear the leaves conferred;
The bushes they were bells;
I could not find a privacy
From Nature's sentinels.

In cave if I presumed to hide,
The walls began to tell;
Creation seemed a mighty crack
To make me visible. ~ Emily Dickinson

No one would believe that in this howling waste there could still be men; but steel helmets now appear on all sides out of the trench, and fifty yards from us a machine-gun is already in position and barking. The wire entanglements are torn to pieces. Yet they offer some obstacle. We see the storm-troops coming. Our artillery opens fire. Machine-guns rattle, rifles crack. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

Why we are here: To tremble at the terrible beauty of the stars, to shed a tear at the perfection of Beethoven's symphonies, and to crack a cold one now and then. ~ David Letterman

I was feeling particularly nasty tonight. Or maybe it was the darkness in me. Sort of PMS on crack. ~ Shea MacLeod

My father-in-law tripped on a crack in the pavement and spent the rest of the week politely pretending he had not dislocated his shoulder. ~ Tina Fey

They promised me that this would be my home. That girls like you would always be my sisters. But they weren't my sisters, were they? Catherine asked, but then the lunacy broke, a quick and fleeting crack, and through it I saw anger and bitterness and rage. ~ Ally Carter

That in this town prostitutes may give sewing lessons to ladies of the church, pirates my be consulted for their opinions on seaworth by shipbuilders, Christians and Jews may stroll together on a Sunday, and Indians my play dice games with leatherstockings, but let one silver piece fall in a crack between two members of the same profession and it's bloody war. ~ Robert McCammon

So far as Emma was concerned she did not ask herself whether she was in love. Love, she thought, was something that must come suddenly, with a great display of thunder and lightning, descending on one's life like a tempest from above, turning it topsy-turvy, whirling away one's resolutions like leaves and bearing one onward, heart and soul, towards the abyss. She never bethought herself how on the terrace of a house the rain forms itself into little lakes when the gutters are choked, and she was going on quite unaware of her peril, when all of a sudden she discovered
a crack in the wall! ~ Gustave Flaubert

This guy's testimony is awesome. I hate my testimony. I wish I was addicted to heroin. But no. I had to grow up in a somewhat functional family situation. It's just not fair. Why can't I be a crack addict who robbed Fort Knox using nothing but a can of hairspray and a plastic ice cream scoop? Thanks a lot, God. ~ Tim Hawkins

Who's there?"
"The scratcher of your itch," he said.
She opened the door a crack and stuck her nose out. "Was that supposed to be romantic? ~ Jill Shalvis

I'm a technophobe. I can't crack the iPhone, and the extent of my multitasking is being able to talk while I make a drink. ~ Len Goodman

Reagan's neglect of the inner city is responsible for hiphop. Hiphop is created thanks to the conditions that crack set: easy money but a lot of work, the violence involved, the stories it produced. Crack helped birth hiphop. ~ Questlove

I went to Shea Stadium and used the men's room. Terrifying. There was this little kid looking at me through the crack [in the stall]. and I was like, "If you tell anyone what you've seen ... " ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Note to the ladies, for whom peanut butter seems to be like crack: the tablespoon scoop should be no more than a small mound, not half the jar balanced on a spoon. ~ Timothy Ferriss

I crack myself up. ~ James W. Huston

I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No ... one ... would ... care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

A random crack in the old plaster in the corner behind her seemed to grow, until it curled its way across the ceiling, circled the frosted chandelier, and swirled its way back down. It looked like a heart. A giant, looping, girly heart had just appeared in the cracking plaster of her bedroom ceiling.
"Lena."
"Yeah?"
"Is your ceiling about to fall in on our heads?"
She turned and looked at the crack. When she saw it, she bit her lip, and her cheeks turned pink. "I don't think so. It's just a crack in the plaster."
"Were you trying to do that?"
"No." A creeping pink spread across her nose and cheeks. She looked away. ~ Kami Garcia