Hunter S. Thompson Quotes (79 Quotes)

Ignore that nightmare in the bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn't handle the pressure. My attorney has never been able to accept the notion - often espoused by reformed drug abusers and especially popular among those on probation - that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them. And neither have I, for that matter.

The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel-white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange.

Which is not really a hell of a lot to ask, Lord, because the final incredible truth is that I am not guilty. All I did was take your gibberish seriously... and you see where it got me? My primitive Christian instincts have made me a criminal.

Jesus Creeping God! Is there a priest in this tavern? I want to confess! I'm a fucking sinner! Venal, mortal, carnal, major, minor - however you want to call it, Lord... I'm guilty.

The waitress had the appearance of a very old hooker who had finally found her place in life

Who said anything about slicing you up? ... I just wanted to carve a little Z on your forehead-- nothing serious.

Jesus! Did I SAY that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me? I glanced over at my attorney, but he seemed oblivious...

There is nothing worse than a man in the throws of an ether bender.

A little bit of this town goes a very long way. After five days in Vegas you feel like you've been here for five years.

With a bit of luck, his life was ruined forever. Always thinking that just behind some narrow door in all of his favorite bars, men in red woolen shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he'll never know.

Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.

There was absolutely no choice but to cut her adrift and hope her memory was fucked.

All energy flows according to the whims of the great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy him.

You took too much man, too much, too much.

My blood is too thick for California: I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate.

Too strange to live, too rare to die!

But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.

Too weird to live, to rare to die.

But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country-but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.

No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

Turn the goddam music up! My heart feels like an alligator!

God's original prototype, too weird to live, too rare to die.

Still humping the American Dream

We can't stop here, this is bat country!

How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection..

Take it from me, there's nothing like a job well done. Except the quiet enveloping darkness at the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam after a job done any way at all.

What do you want? Where's the goddamn ice I ordered? Where's the booze? There's a war on, man! People are being killed!

I blew the horn a few times, hoping to call up an iguana. Get the buggers moving. They were out there, I knew, in that goddamn sea of cactus--hunkered down, barely breathing, and every one of the stinking little bastards was loaded with deadly poison.

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. Probably at the next gas station.