American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis

Here are some great quotes from American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. We made sure to leave out the jucier ones for those of us in the audience who prefer to keep it PG. Make sure to check out Prongs review of the book if you love these quotes!

• " I stare into a thin, weblike 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 absense, 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 a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here."

• "She placed the file on top of the desk before asking, "Doin' the crossword?" dropping the g in "doing" -- A pathetic gesture of intimacy, an irritating stab at forced friendliness."

• "Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn't bore me, obvisouly enough, was how much money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did. There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being-- flesh, blood, skin, hair-- but my depersonilization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had ben eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, the rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn't figure out why -- I couldn't put my finger on it. The only thing that calmed me was the satisfying sound of cie being dropped into a glass of J&B."

• "If another round of Bellinis comes within a twenty foot radius of our table were going to light the maitri de on fire. So you know, warn him."

• "This is what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, or receiving another person's love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term "generosity of spirit" applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire -- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathizing, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt any more. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in...this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged..."

• "How could she ever understand that there isn't any way could be disappointed since I no longer find anything worth looking forward to?"

• "...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusonary, and thought I could hide my cold gaze and you cans hake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable" I simply am not there. "

• "My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it. I have no surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed."

• "Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on other. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this -- and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've committed -- and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. i gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has ben no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing..."

• ...and before I can stop it I find myself almost dazzled and moved that I might have the capacity to accept, though not return, her love. I wonder if even now, right here in Nowheres, she can see the darkening clouds behind my eyes lifting And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will."