Crash Quotes
"The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world."
"Increasingly, our concepts of past, present, and future are being forced to revise themselves."
"We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there."
"The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction."
"The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse."
"I remember my first minor collision in a deserted hotel car-park."
"Our two cars were surrounded by a circle of spectators, their silent faces watching us with enormous seriousness."
"The policemen lifted me from the car, their firm hands steering me onto the stretcher."
"The draped body of the dead man was lifted from the bonnet of my car."
"The bony knuckles of his wrists projected like manacles from the frayed cuffs of his leather jacket."
"I remembered why Vaughan’s career had come to an abrupt end – halfway through his television series he had been seriously injured in a motorcycle crash."
"As one of the first of the new-style TV scientists, Vaughan had combined a high degree of personal glamour with an aggressive lecture-theatre manner."
"This first meeting with Vaughan remained vividly in my mind. I knew that his motives for following me had nothing to do with revenge or blackmail."
"The scars on his mouth and forehead, the self-cut hair and two missing upper canine gave him a neglected and hostile appearance."
"In a sense, I had already enlisted Vaughan in my confused hunt."
"I was convinced that the key to this immense metallized landscape lay somewhere within these constant and unchanging traffic patterns."
"Catherine regarded with profound suspicion my choice of the same make and model as the car in which I had crashed."
"The appearance in this drab yard of an attractive woman, moving from one car to the next like an intelligent gallery visitor, roused me from this reverie upon twelve cigarette ends."
"Vaughan had articulated my needs for some positive response to my crash."
"I was to know Vaughan from this first evening until his death a year later, but the entire course of our relationship was fixed within those few minutes."
"Vaughan’s presence, somewhere around me on these crowded causeways, convinced me that some kind of key could be found to this coming autogeddon."
"Vaughan had forgotten me, starting forward like a patient suburban voyeur half asleep over his binoculars."
"The colour-keyed interiors of the Lincoln and the other cars exactly simulated the skin areas of the young whores whom he undressed as I drove along the darkened expressways."
"I visualized my wife injured in a high-impact collision, her mouth and face destroyed, and a new and exciting orifice opened in her perineum by the splintering steering column."
"As I embraced Gabrielle I visualized, as Vaughan had taught me, the accidents that might involve the famous and beautiful."
"These fantasies were part of the affectionate responses exchanged between us as we drove along the motorway together."
"Vaughan’s body, with its unsavoury skin and greasy pallor, took on a hard, mutilated beauty within the elaborately signalled landscape of the motorway."
"For Vaughan the motor-car was the sexual act’s greatest and only true locus."
"Every aspect of Catherine at this time seemed a model of something else, endlessly extending the possibilities of her body and personality."
"Vaughan’s obsessions with the crashed car became increasingly disordered."
"The possibilities of a new violence, even more exciting for only touching my mind rather than my nerve endings."
"Vaughan questioned me repeatedly about the ways in which Marilyn Monroe or Lee Harvey Oswald would probably have had intercourse in their cars."
"By this time I was certain that if the screen actress never died in a car-crash, Vaughan had created all the possibilities of her death."
"This was not Seagrave’s death, but that in his collision, still wearing Elizabeth Taylor’s wig and costume, Seagrave had preempted that real death which Vaughan had reserved for himself."
"Mesmerized, Vaughan stared at the fragment, prodding the stitched vinyl inlay that traversed the triangle from its apex."
"The automobile crash had made possible the final and longed-for union of the actress and the members of her audience."
"Each of the spectators at the accident site would carry away an image of the violent transformation of this woman."
"Without needing any instruction from Vaughan, I listened to the police and ambulance frequencies, propelling the heavy car up and down the access roads in pursuit of the latest vehicle pile-up and collision."
"My horror and disgust at the sight of these appalling injuries had given way to a lucid acceptance."
"The daylight above the motorway grew brighter, an intense desert air. The white concrete became a curving bone."
"Terrified by these brief re-enactments, I held Catherine’s hands as she pressed my shoulders, trying to convince myself that I was sitting with her by a sealed window in my own apartment."
"Catherine’s car sat in the drive below the bedroom window. The paintwork along the left-hand side had been marked in some minor collision."
"As I lay beside Catherine at night, my hands modelling her breasts, I visualized her body in contact with various points of the Lincoln’s interior."