Quotes by Ellis Towne

“A town is a heartless thing, unfaithful and forgetful. It will never love you back.””

“Café Flore is packed, shimmering, every table filled. Bentley notices this with a grim satisfaction but Bentley feels lost. He’s still haunted by the movie Grease and obsessed with legs that he always felt were too skinny though no one else did and it never hampered his modeling career and he’s still not over a boy he met at a Styx concert in 1979 in a stadium somewhere in the Midwest, outside a town he has not been back to since he left it at eighteen, and that boy’s name was Cal, who pretended to be straight even though he initially fell for Bentley’s looks but Cal knew Bentley was emotionally crippled and the fact that Bentley didn’t believe in heaven didn’t make him more endearing so Cal drifted off and inevitably became head of programming at HBO for a year or two. Bentley sits down, already miked, and lights a cigarette. Next to them Japanese tourists study maps, occasionally snap photos. This is the establishing shot.””

“Is that what we do? We pitch our tents, do our little clown shows, and then take off up the road to the next town ahead? Leaving our science-fictional debris on the blasted dirt to poison the minds of future generations, like the alien litter in STALKER and ROADSIDE PICNIC. Flying cars rusting out like Saturn Five rockets propped up as roadkill talismans at Kennedy, leaking toxins into the soil. Jetpacks oozing fuel from cracks in their tanks and poisoning the grass. Three-ring moonbases crumbling in the solar wind. Birdshit on the time machines. Big fat rats scavenging broken packs of food capsules, Best Before Date of 1971. A Westinghouse Robot Smoking Companion, vintage of 1931, slumped up against a tree, tin fingers still twitching for a cigarette. Vines growing through a busted cyberspace deck. The shreds of inflatable furniture designed for the space hospitals of 1955. Lizards perched atop a weather control cannon. Atomic batteries mouldering inside the grips of laser pistols abandoned in the weeds.””

“As far as his contemporaries were concerned, there was no question about his stature in American history. In the extravaganza of mourning that occurred in more than four hundred towns and hamlets throughout the land, he was described as the only indisputable hero of the age, the one and only “His Excellency.””

“Got a ride to Cologne and stayed at a youth hostel in Bonn which was worst youth hostel where there were a lot of really screwed-up kids, and it was too far away from the main part of town so we couldn't do anything.””

“While she was gone I would vomit”

“there’s starvation in the town, though I doubt if either empress or bishop is going short.” He was a man who spoke his mind, and no great respecter of high personages. “A very different tale for the poor townsfolk! But it’s biting even the garrison””

“Scholars have argued whether Tacitus, who first records the Latin form of the name Londinium was recording this from the Celtic Lugdunum (fortress of Lug) or from another Celtic word, a word still surviving in the Irish root, londo – the wild place. London, as a Celtic trading town of the Trinovantes, stood on the north bank of the Thames, or Tamesis, as it was recorded. Tamesis means “the dark river”, cognate with the Sanskrit Tamesa, meaning exactly the same. Now the River Tamesa is a tributary of the Ganges, a sacred river of the Hindus, in which votive offerings were placed.””