wong quotes

B. Rake

2023-12-23

books, wisdom

Wisdom to live by

“I had a familiar, nervous sensation, one that goes all the way back to elementary school. It’s the simultaneous realization that I may have talked my way into another fistfight, and that I had not spent any time learning to fight since the last one.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“It doesn’t eat only birds, it mostly eats rats and insects, but they still call it the “Bird-Eating Spider” because the fact that it can eat a bird is the most important thing you need to know about it. If you run across one of these things, like in your closet or crawling out of your bowl of soup, the first thing somebody will say is, “Watch it, man, that thing can eat a goddamned bird.” I don’t know how they catch the birds. I know the Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider can’t fly because if it could, it would have a different name entirely. We would call it “sir” because it would be the dominant species on the planet. None of us would leave the house unless a Goliath Fucking Flying Bird-Eating Spider said it was okay.”
– David Wong,-This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

“I said to John, “You know that if you walked around the world, your hat would travel thirty-one feet farther than your shoes?” John said, “I dunno, Dave, but before we make a bomb I have to shave half the dog.” I nodded. He got up, called to Molly and herded her into my bathroom. I wondered when the soy sauce would take effect.”
– David Wong,-John Dies at the End

“You are now aware that your lower jaw has weight, and that it requires effort for you to hold it up. Good evening.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

“It’s like in the moment Tasker asked to speak to us, we simultaneously split into three separate timelines. If you understand how this sort of thing could work, please write down your explanation with as much clarity and detail as you can, then throw it in the trash because who gives a shit.”
– David Wong, What the Hell Did I Just Read

“Imagine fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they’ve been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made from T-bone steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it into the center of your skull at ten thousand watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“Every man is blessed with his gifts from the Lord. One of mine happens to be a penis large enough that, if it had a penis of its own, my penis’s penis would be larger than your penis.” There was a moment of stunned silence, then I heard Jen start laughing so hard I thought she would choke. “Fuck all of you,” John retorted. “You don’t even exist. We’re all just a figment of my cock’s imagination.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“I mean, if they had just succumbed to passion and banged in my bed, I could understand that. I wouldn’t even be mad, as long as Amy was happy and they cleaned up afterward. But coming into another man’s house and making breakfast for his girl in his own kitchen? That’s some serial killer shit.”
– David Wong, What the Hell Did I Just Read

“The truth was, I didn’t feel sorry for Billy. He teased a dog and got his fingers bitten off. Fuck him. Fuck everybody. And fuck you, Amy, for somehow getting me to tell you this. Sure, yeah, I felt bad about it, Your Honor. And that day years ago when I heard about the kids shooting up the school in Colorado I shook my head and said it was a tragedy, an awful tragedy, but inside I was thinking the look on the jocks’ faces when they saw the guns must have been fucking priceless. So, yeah, as far as you know, I felt just as bad about Billy as a good person would. And I’ll never, ever tell you otherwise. Never.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“The man who greeted her on the sidewalk was named Hank Kowalski. He was bald and had the eyes of a man whose favorite joke is just a shrieking child falling down a flight of stairs.”
– David Wong, Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

“Let’s just say it’s magic.”
“Let’s just say that I need a little more explanation than that if I’m going to go along with this.”
John sighed.
“Okay, have you heard of nanotechnology?”
“Yeah. Microscopic robots, right?”
“Right, and imagine they can make millions of these robots and embed them in a liquid, so that you now have a liquid infused with the power of all these machines. Got it?”
“All right.”
“Now imagine if, instead of tiny robots, it’s magic.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders

“It was a unique sensation; the best comparison I can offer is if you opened your fridge to realize something was rotten in there, then when you opened the cheese drawer, you found a photo of your mother fucking a Dalmatian.”
– David Wong, What the Hell Did I Just Read

“Six centuries ago, the pre-Columbian natives who settled here named this region with a word that in their language translates to, “The Mouth of the Shadow.” Later, the Iroquois who showed up and inexplicably slaughtered every man, woman, and child in those first tribes renamed it a word that literally translates to, “Seriously, Fuck this Place.” When French explorer Jacques Marquette explored the area in 1673, he marked it on his map with a crude drawing of what appeared to be a black blob falling out of Satan’s butthole.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

“I fully recognize that all of those are things only a mentally ill person believes. Therefore, I do not believe them.” Boom. Therapy accomplished.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

“John jolted awake to find himself staring down a shotgun wielded by his greatest enemy: himself.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

“No matter who you are or where you’re from, we can all look upon the raw, energetic creations of children and agree that they are very shitty artists.”
– David Wong, What the Hell Did I Just Read

“I squinted drunkenly into the rearview mirror and tried in vain to find the headlights of the black truck that was chasing us, but I actually wasn’t sure if its drivers needed headlights to see or if they even had eyes. I also wasn’t sure it was a truck, or if it was black, or if we were being pursued at all. It was definitely raining, though.”
– David Wong, What the Hell Did I Just Read

“the heavy monkey of sleep rested its warm, furry ass on my eyelids.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“Velvet Jesus faced a shadow man to my left. Laser beams fired from his eyes.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

“The guy next to him looked like he had covered his body in glue and rolled through a knife store. At the bottom of the feed was a logo that said “LEAGUE OF BADASS.”
– David Wong, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

“Alcohol was the reason we formed complex civilizations, and having to deal with the complexities of civilization is the reason most of us need alcohol.”
– David Wong

“You know, I observed a man who masturbated until he bled. Did he want to do that?”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“If you want to frisk me, I’ll let you, but you got to hurry because there’s a lot of me and we don’t got much time. And don’t be alarmed if I get aroused.”
– David Wong, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

“With a bassy thump and a smell like burnt sulfur, Shitload farted himself far into the air.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“He then wrestled away the man’s gun and “dick-whipped” him with it. I am unclear as to whether or not this means he struck the man in the groin or merely slapped him in the same manner in which he would slap a person with his dick.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“I walked right into a girl, broadsided her, felled her like a tree. I saw, to my horror, that it was Jennifer Lopez.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“there was a reason Zoey had downed a fairly large antianxiety cookie before anyone had arrived.”
– David Wong, Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

“My feet had never been so bare. Those little naked toes.That spider thing probably looks at those like the ears on a chocolate bunny.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders

“It was a shriek, like microphone feedback. But more organic and pained, like the sound a whale would make if it were on fire.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

“I then reached out, put my hands under his armpits and lifted him into the air. He was about as heavy as a department store mannequin. I doubt you’ve ever lifted one of those but you can probably guess that they’re not very heavy.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“With a bassy thump and a smell like burnt sulfur, Shitload farted himself far into the air.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“save your love for the things that can love you back.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

“Look,” Amy said, from behind me. “They threw laundry all over your floor in there.” “Yeah. And they wore the clothes first, the bastards.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“Son, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“You’re the kind of man a man wants when a man wants a man.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“There was a faded brown stain on the carpet and I wondered if a patient had once taken a shit in here in the middle of a session. I”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full Of Spiders: Seriously Dude Don’t Touch It

“that proverbial moment in which you realize your nausea is going to turn into a puke and that there is nothing to be done about it.”
– David Wong, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

“I turned on the radio, looking for something to blast the thoughts out of my head, hoping the moist nighttime air would blow in a rare noncountry station. I ground through static and static and static, then recoiled at the shrill, choking sound of a man apparently squealing through a crushed larynx. After a moment I realized it was simply Fred Durst and the group Limp Bizkit-Shitload’s favorite band. They’re the ones who invented the musical technique of feeding a list of generic rap phrases to a goat, then reading its turds into a microphone over heavy metal guitar.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“He stared at the gadget in his hand and said, “So it’s a magnet for cats? Hey! It’s a pussy mag-“
– David Wong, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

“The horizon was shitting a sun, casting a glow on a layer of fog that was settling in the low areas like puddles of ghost piss.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

“We didn’t do any of it on purpose. We’re just … not very good at things.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

“He buckled his seat belt, which he always did because he never knew when he would need to ramp something. He made the engine growl and told the headlights to fuck the night.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders

“John glanced around, half expecting to see a disheveled Dave pulling himself up from some spot on the floor. He’d be squinting, his hair matted down, looking like he’d just been shit out of a dinosaur.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders

“It doesn’t eat only birds-it mostly eats rats and insects-but they still call it the “Bird-Eating Spider” because the fact that it can eat a bird is the most important thing you need to know about it.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

“seriously, listen up because this is important and this is where we’ll leave it. Your boy, my guess is he never stopped thinkin’ you were beautiful. The only thing that changed was he started worrying that other people didn’t think you were. So now he’s gonna spend his life with a gorgeous, boring woman who’ll make him miserable, all so that he can wear her on his arm to parties, thinkin’ that’ll show other people how great he is. He’ll pick the career and car and mansion that he thinks other people expect him to have, put all his energy into building up that front. Then one day he’ll find out his life is all wrapping paper and no gift.”
– David Wong, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

“I’m here to tell ya, immigration, it’s like rats on a ship. America is the ship and allllll these rats are comin’ on board, y’all. And you know what happens when a ship gets too many rats on board? It sinks. That’s what.” I wondered if a ship had ever really sunk that way.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“They say you’re the best.” I didn’t inform her that whoever called us “the best” had pretty low standards. I guess we were the best in town at this, but who would you brag to about that? It’s not like this shit has its own section of the phone book.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“Sixteen different objections rose up in my mind at once and somehow they all canceled each other out. Maybe if there had been an odd number. . .”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“Zoey was disappointed that the van didn’t explode into a fireball like in old action movies, but that was one of the downsides of electric car technology.”
– David Wong, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

“
You know the Tower of Babel, right? You went to Sunday School?”

“Yeah, sure. In ancient times everybody on earth spoke the same language, then they decided to build a tower that would reach all the way up to heaven. Then God cursed everybody on the job site to each speak a different language to mess them up.

“
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders

“You see, because John and I have this thing where we’re both seeing completely different versions of you. Now, John has eyesight problems because of his constant masturbation, but I don’t think-“ She burst into snakes.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“A mask of feigned nonchalance. It took practice to come up with that look. Somebody who had been shamed so many times that he’d adapted to simply never showing it, rather than changing to not do things he was ashamed of.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders

“The first step toward gaining a true understanding of the universe is to grasp the sheer scale of humanity’s ignorance. No human has ever made it to step two.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“I’m not crazy,” I said, crazily, to my court-appointed therapist.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

“OH SON OF A MOTHERFUCK THE FUCKING SOY SAUCE IS DIGGING A FUCKING HOLE INTO MY FUCKING FACE.”
– David Wong, John Dies at the End

“Type of guy whose life had gone exactly as he’d expected it. I bet he’d never shot a delivery guy with a crossbow even once.”
– David Wong, This Book Is Full Of Spiders: Seriously Dude Don’t Touch It