You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
QUENTIN CRISPThe flagrantly gay Quentin Crisp dealt with homophobic bullying by refusing to bow to its onslaught. His number listed in the phone directory, he responded to derogatory remarks accompanied with a stated intent to kill him by asking, “Would you like to make an appointment?”
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): “What’s the matter, sexy? Don’t you like dehydrated fruit?
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If I were God – and I never understand why I’m not – I should say, “Shop around, I don’t think you’ll find a better bargain than here.”
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In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
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Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.
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Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.
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Women have decided to be people, which is a great mistake. Women were nicer than people.
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Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together,
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I never say ‘No’ to anything.
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Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
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My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
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What my parents thought of this, I don’t know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.
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To lose is not always failure.
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Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
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If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn.
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I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.
QUENTIN CRISP