things that have stuck in my mind over the years

Some things you read tickle you, and they come back to you again and again over the years. For me, as I've said before but it bears repeating, this is one of them (from The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies):

‘Isn’t that the Odeon?’
‘No, this is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Good-night.’

This, from The Great American Novel by Philip Roth, is another:

I refuse to apologise or explain or verify any remarks I have ever made to anyone over the telephone, face to face, in my sleep, in my cups, or in my solitude. I refuse to participate in this lunatic comedy in which American baseball players who could not locate Russia on a map of the world – who could not locate the world on a map of the world – denounce themselves and their team-mates as Communist spies out of fear and intimidation and howling ignorance, or, as is the case with that case named Baal, out of incorrigible human perversity and curdled genes

Curdled genes is the bit that I use instinctively from time to time, though for some reason I always remember it as 'sheer curdled genes'