| Quotes from Burned by Ellen Hopkins |
[Nov. 16th, 2009|12:45 am] |
"I began to view the world at large through borrowed eyes, eyes more like those I wanted to own."
"In my view having babies was supposed to be something beautiful, not a duty. Something incredible, not role-playing. Bringing new life into this dying world, promising hope for a sane tomorrow. As I saw it, any expectation of sanity rested in a woman's womb."
"It wasn't like my life had changed at all, and maybe that was part of the problem. Because something inside me was different. Shifting, like a tide or sand dune. That something was growing, stretching, taking shape beneath my skin. And I wondered if very soon it might blow me apart at the seams." |
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| emmanuel levinas |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|09:13 pm] |
for others, in spite of myself, from myself.
autrement qu 'être. |
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| bukowski |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|08:22 pm] |
drunk on the dark streets of some city,
it's night, you're lost, where's your
room?
you enter a bar to find yourself,
order scotch and water.
damned bar's sloppy wet, it soaks
part of one of your shirt
sleeves.
It's a clip joint-the scotch is weak.
you order a bottle of beer.
Madame Death walks up to you
wearing a dress.
she sits down, you buy her a
beer, she stinks of swamps, presses
a leg against you.
the bar tender sneers.
you've got him worried, he doesn't
know if you're a cop, a killer, a
madman or an
Idiot.
you ask for a vodka.
you pour the vodka into the top of
the beer bottle.
It's one a.m. In a dead cow world.
you ask her how much for head,
drink everything down, it tastes
like machine oil.
you leave Madame Death there,
you leave the sneering bartender
there.
you have remembered where
your room is.
the room with the full bottle of
wine on the dresser.
the room with the dance of the
roaches.
Perfection in the Star Turd
where love died
laughing |
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| Richard Adams, Watership Down |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|08:14 pm] |
All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a thousand enemies.
And when they catch you, they will kill you…
But first, they must catch you. |
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| hermann hesse, gertrude |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|05:50 pm] |
"That life is difficult, I have often bitterly realized. I now had further cause for serious reflection. Right up to the present I have never lost the feeling of contradiction that lies behind all knowledge. My life has been miserable and difficult, and yet to others, and sometimes to myself, it has seemed rich and wonderful. Man's life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness."
"Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children and often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them." |
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| chuck palahniuk, choke |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|05:46 pm] |
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What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction. |
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| t.s. eliot, east coker |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|05:43 pm] |
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious
of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the
waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the
dancing. |
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| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Cancer Ward |
[Nov. 16th, 2009|10:08 am] |
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I can tell you quite frankly: even when we were having the most intellectural conversations and I honestly thought and believe everything I said, I still wanted all the time, all the time, to pick you up and kiss you on the lips. |
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| Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|05:35 pm] |
'You come out; it is still dark. The door creaks, or perhaps you sneeze, or the snow crunches under your foot, and hares start up from the far cabbage patch and leap away, leaving the snow criss-crossed with tracks. In the distance dogs begin to howl and it takes a long time before the quieten down. The cocks have finished their crowing and have nothing left to say. Then dawn breaks.' |
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| The Anthologist |
[Nov. 14th, 2009|05:11 pm] |
What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day's stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things - so that the day's stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant - pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man that Horace was.
-The Anthologist, Pg. 127, Nicholson Baker
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| Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|06:55 pm] |
People are stupid: given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true.
Wizard's First Rule (The Sword of Truth), by Terry Goodkind |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|01:17 am] |
In chaos there is fertility.
- The diary of Anais Nin, Vol.1 |
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| Master and Man |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|01:02 am] |
He couldn't stay still; he wanted to get up and busy himself with something, to choke back the fear rising in him, against which he felt quite powerless... |
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| Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. |
[Nov. 14th, 2009|05:12 pm] |
I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth. |
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| Wow. Is all. A little long, but each quote is worth quoting/readin, in my opinion. |
[Nov. 14th, 2009|07:00 pm] |
♥ Black: ...I aint a doubter. But I am a questioner.
White: What's the difference?
Black: Well, I think the questioner wants the truth. The doubter wants to be told there aint no such thing.
♥ Oh, you might say somethin about the other man's mama. That's a sensitive area, you might say. And he might lose it and come after your ass but when he done that it's like he's sayin that what you just got done tellin about his mama was true. It's like he sayin: You aint supposed to know that about my mama and you damn sure aint supposed to of told it and now I'm fixin to whip your ass.
♥ White: Well I still dont get it. Why not go someplace where you might be able to do some good?
Black: As opposed to someplace where god was needed.
White: Even God gives up at some point. There's no ministry in hell. That I ever heard of.
♥ Well now wait a minute. Just cause you dont like em dont mean you aint like em.
♥ I don't know, Professor. I try and go by what I see. The simplest things has got more to em than you can ever understand. Bunch of people standin around on a train platform of a mornin. Waitin to go to work. Been there a hundred times. A thousand maybe. It's just a train platform. Aint nothin else much you can say about it. But they might be one commuter waitin there on the edge of that platform that for him it's somethin else. It might even be the edge of the world. The edge of the universe. He's starin at the end of all tomorrows and he's drawin a shade over ever yesterday that ever was. So he's a different kind of commuter. He's worlds away from them everday travelers. Nothin to do with them at all.
♥ You need to listen. Or you need to believe what you hearin. The whole point of where this is goin - which you wanted to know - is that they aint no jews. Aint no whites. Aint no niggers. People of color. Aint none of that. At the deep bottom of the mine where the gold is at there aint none of that. There's just the pure ore. That forever thing. That you dont think is there. That thing that helps to keep folks nailed down to the platform when the Sunset Limited comes through. Even when they think they might want to get aboard. That thing that makes it possible to ladle out benediction upon the heads of strangers instead of curses. It's all the same thing. And it aint but one thing. Just one.
♥ Here's what I would say. I would say that the thing we are talkin about is Jesus, but it is Jesus understood as that gold at the bottom of the mine. He couldnt come down here and take the form of a man if that form was no done shaped to accommodate him. And if I said that there aint no way for Jesus to be ever a man without ever man bein Jesus then I believe that might be a pretty big heresy. But that's alright.
♥ White: I don't know. The Germans contributed a great deal to civilization. (Pause) Before Hitler.
Black: And then they contributed Hitler.
♥ The darker picture is always the correct one. When you read the history of the world you are reading a saga of bloodshed and greed and folly the import of which is impossible to ignore. And yet we imagine that the future will somehow be different. I've no idea why we are even still here but in all probability we will not be here much longer.
♥ Sometimes faith might just be a case of not havin nothin else left.
♥ What kind of pain we talkin about? I got to say that if it was grief that brought folks to suicide it'd be a full time job just to get em all in the ground come sundown. So I keep coming back to the same question. If it aint what you lost that is more than you can bear then maybe it's what you wont lose. What you'd rather die than to give up.
♥ You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.
♥ I dont believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamor and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain was actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldn't live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love. Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. All with a single conclusion. For you and for every thing that you have chosen to care for. There's the true brotherhood. The true fellowship. And everyone is a member for life. You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes. I do. And what I see sickens me.
~~The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy. |
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