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That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the
floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out
and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking
in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all the other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired
and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too
and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel
alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while
I was with many girls and that is the way that you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were
together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot
be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their
loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time.
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The
world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills
the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you
too but there will be no special hurry.
-hemingway, a farewell to arms
Those must have all been important to me once. What I am now grew from that.
A former self is a fool, an insufferable
ass, but he's still human, you'd no more
turn him out than you'd turn out any kind of cripple, would you?
-pynchon
We talked about the Pope and birth control, about Hitler and the Jews. We talked about phonies. We talked about the truth.
We talked about gangsters; we talked about business. We talked about the nice poor people who went to the electric chair;
and we talked about the rich bastards who didn’t. We talked about rich bastards who had perversions. We talked about
a lot of things.”
-vonnegut, cat's cradle
“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”
Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know
it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the
love. Always the hours
I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember
thinking to myself this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It
never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.
Oh, Mrs. Dalloway... Always giving parties to cover the silence
I’m going back to Mike.” I could feel her crying as I held her close. “He’s so damned nice and
he’s so awful. He’s my sort of thing.”
-hemingway, the sun also rises
'Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself
by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that.'
-hem, tsar
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing."
"Oh, how charmingly you get angry," he said. "I wish I had that faculty."
You're getting damned romantic."
"No, bored."
"Oh, darling, I've been so miserable," Brett said.
"That's my fault. Don't we pay for all the things we do, though?"
She had been looking into my eyes all the time. Her eyes had different depths, sometimes they seemed perfectly flat. Now
you could see all the way into them.
"When I think of the hell I've put chaps through. I'm paying for it all now."
"Good night, darling."
"Don't be sentimental."
"Mr. Barnes," answered the count, "all I want out of wines is to enjoy them."
"The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits.
People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself." - hemingway
"It was all part of the fight against poverty that you never win except by not spending. Especially if you buy pictures
instead of clothing." - hemingway
"We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other." - hemingway
"There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that's gone now. Memory is hunger." - hemingway
"But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor
the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight." - hemingway
"By then I knew that everything good and bad left an empitness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled
up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better." - hemingway
"and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry." - hemingway
"It is necessary to handle yourself better when you have to cut down on food so you will not get too much hunger-thinking.
Hunger is a good discipline and you learn from it. And as long as they do not understand it you are ahead of them." - hemingway
"I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life." - hemingway
"Becoming unconscious when they drank had always been their great defense." - hemingway
"Scott did not like the places nor the people and he had to drink more than he could drink and be in any control of himself,
to stand the people and the places..." - hemingway
"There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We
always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached.
Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in th eearly days
when we were very poor and very happy." - hemingway, a moveable feast
"
“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the
hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe
in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest
with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin
of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what
is already there.” -henry miller
“The really criminal thing is to make a person believe that he or she is the only one you could ever love." - miller
"The key is to incorporate chemistry into our marital lives, not to snuff it out. We are erotic and emotional animals,
and when we react most fully to people, we react to them erotically and emotionally...To demonize this responsiveness is to
truncate our sensibility, our humanity. Better to share our passing fancies with our mates, to turn them like colored glass
in the light, lest they become blades in our pockets. For this we need magnanimous partners. And we need an 18-karat commitment
to those partners, who over the years will inevitably seem less perfect than those glinting shards of novelty in the corner
of our sight.
'To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god,' said Jorge Luis Borges. To love truly is to stay in
love after the fall. It is to love more gratefully, more potently, because our god has come down to earth: the spirit has
been made flesh and now walks-- and slips, and flounders, and slouches-- among us.
It's a delicate proposition-- counterintuitive, presumptuous, heady, unreasonable. And yet therein lies its nobility, and
perhaps, its necessity."
-atlantic monthly July/Aug 2005
"You don't know what it means to love that way, do you? You think only of the same face for breakfast every day. I think
of how wonderful her face is, how it changes every minute. I never see her twice the same way. I see only an infinity of adoration."
-henry miller, sexus
"Jewel," he said, "I don't want you to think that's why I'm here."
Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter
what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and
people continue to dissapoint them.
-my sister's keeper, piccoult
"Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security, and peace
of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in
its healing."
Sons and Lovers by: D.H. Lawrence
Samantha: I have to ask you a question. It's a good one so think about it. If two people love each other, but they
just can't seem to get it together, when do you get to that point of enough is enough?
Jerry: Never.
-The
Mexican
"What has the actual lapse of time got to do with it? It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an
emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to
be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."
- Dorian Gray, from "The
Picture of Dorian Gray", by Oscar Wilde
I thought we were a real love relationship. I did. I was very invested in love, but it was just this
long, long sex thing that could end at any moment because, after all, it's just about getting off. Manus would close
his power blue eyes and twist his head just so, side to side, and swallow.
And, Yes, I'd tell Manus. I came right when
he did.
Pillow talk.
Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.
This
only looks like love.
-Invisible Monsters, Palahniuk
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have
happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable
Lightness of Being
Man, do you know what it's like to love a woman so much that just watching her breathe stops
time?"
Mark, his discomfort obvious, said nothing. But Kyle pushed for a response.
"Well, do you?"
"No. I'm afraid
I don't."
"Makes you feel like you'll live forever, man. Fucking forever."
Kyle began pacing the length of the room,
agitated, arms fluttering, like a child imitating flight.
"That only comes along once, you know. And when it's gone, it's
like a piece of you's being cut out." He ran a finger down the center of his chest. "Bzzzzzt. Gone. A missing heart. Now you
tell me how you live without a heart. Huh?"
"I...uh..."
"Exactly!" He made a flying leap across the room. "So what do
you do? Fill up that hole with bubble wrap? Stuff it full of newpapers? Dead leaves?"
Mark wondered if he was supposed
to pick the best possible answer, but Kyle drifted away for a while, a brief visit to his past. When he returned, he was calmer.
"We
used to go to the river together to watch the sun come up. She said each morning was like a new breath." He stopped, folded
his arms across his chest and closed his eyes. "A new breath," he whispered.
Shoot the Moon
Billie Letts
"Did you know that during the teen years, the brain goes through an intense developmental phase comparable to that of a
newborn baby?"
"Is that another conversational construct?" I asked.
"No," he said. "I have a point."
"Make
it."
"During that phase, the cells and connections that are frequently used survive and flourish. And those that aren't
used just die away."
"Point, please."
"It was good that you gave Len a chance, even though it didn't work out.
You had to exercise that part of your brain, the part that lets you fall for someone, otherwise you'd never be able to fall
in love with anyone. Ever."
I gazed up at Marcus, who was now standing long and lean in front of me, all mischievous
half-smile, sly eyes, and glass-cut cheekbones. I wanted to ask, Hey, Marcus, what happens to people with the opposite
problem? The ones who fall three dozen times, plus three?
-Megan McCafferty, Second Helpings
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing
that never fails. You may grow old and tremble in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of
your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour
trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then-- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags
it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust,
and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn-- pure science,
the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after
you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics--
why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat
your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough."
~white,
once and future king
Rule #100
Letting go is the best revenge.
It frees your heart for much
more satistying pursuits.
Rule
#17
A lady doesn't waste her time on bad memories.
"I don't know why it is that when the clock strikes, you feel all the more the absence of someone."
Julia Alvarez,
In the Time of the Butterflies
Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little
my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on
the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there,
I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped
in a perfect world."
The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave
us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret
hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for
the staggering presumption of our love?
-stephen king
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three
steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four
feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms
she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no
Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many
years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies
and gentleman of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed,simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look
at this tangle of thorns." -Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita.
I wonder which is preferable -- to walk around all your life swollen up with your secrets until you burst from the pressure
of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word for them, so at the end you're depleted
of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin -- everything that was of the deepest
importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone -- and must
spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label
so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?
-atwood, the blind assassin
JACK. How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can't make out. You seem to
me to be perfectly heartless.
ALGERNON. Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably
get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.
The Importance of Being
Earnest by Oscar Wilde
She shook her head. "I believe in the race," she cried.
"It represents the survival of the pushing."
"It has development."
"Decay
fascinates me more."
"What of Art?" she asked.
"It is a malady."
"Love?"
"An illusion."
"Religion?"
"The
fashionable substitute for Belief."
"You are a sceptic."
"Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith."
"What are
you?"
"To define is to limit."
"Give me a clue."
"Threads snap. You would lose your way in the labyrinth."
"You
bewilder me. Let us talk about something else."
-picture of dorian gray, wilde
"His heart beat faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew
that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp
again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.
Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete"
--fitzgerald
"...and because you're eighteen, because you're still vulnerable, because you still don't have faith in yourself, you talk
a little fliply, a little too wisely, just to cover up so you won't be accused of sentimentality or emotionalism or feminine
tactics. You cover up, so you can laugh at yourself while there's still time."
-Sylvia Plath
"How dreadful!" cried Lord Henry. "I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair
about it's use. It is hitting below the intellect."
-wilde
"He did not know why he was so irrationally happy, for nothing was changed in his life or hers. He had not even touched
the tip of her fingers or looked her full in the eyes. But their evening together had given him a vision of what life at her
side might be, and he was glad now that he had done nothing to trouble the sweetness of the picture."
-ethan frome
I thought she was sleeping until I heard her call out from across the room, "Will you bring me a glass of water?"
I did. Then in her always-sleepy tone and drawl she said, "Do you remember when you were a little boy and you would
ask your mama to bring you a glass of water?" Yeah. "You know half the time you weren't even thirsty. You
just wanted that hand that was attached to that glass that was attached to that person you just wanted to stay there until
you fell asleep." She took the glass of water that I brought her and just sat it down full on the table next to her.
Wow, I thought. What am I gonna do with love like this.
-Dito Montiel, A Guide
To Recognizing Your Saints
I want to love first, and live incidentally.
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
"Pooh!" he whispered.
"Yes, Piglet?"
"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's
paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you."
"Why do we close out eyes when we dream? When we cry? When we imagine? When we kiss? Because
the most beautiful things in the world are unseen."
"Dreaming is like dying, without the trauma or agony; it sucks you under like smooth, whispering quicksand, and leaves
reality, its pains and stresses behind. I long for its lull on nights like this, wishing for dreams that can't come. Sometimes
I wish I could sleep forever - sometimes I wish I could die."
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties
we know they won't save us any more than love did.
~Fitzgerald
. . . the only ones for me are the mad ones, the
ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or
say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and
in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!
DON JUAN. . . . [this] reduced love for me
to the mere pleasure of a moment, art for me to the mere schooling of my faculties, religion for me to a mere excuse for laziness,
since it had set up a God who looked at the world and saw that it was good, against the instinct in me that looked through
my eyes at the world and saw that it could be improved. I tell you that in the pursuit of my own pleasure, my own health,
my own fortune, I have never known happiness. It was not love for Woman that delivered me into her hands: it was fatigue,
exhaustion. When I was a child, and bruised my head against a stone, I ran to the nearest woman and cried away my pain against
her apron.
THE DEVIL. Well, well, go your way, Señor Don Juan. I prefer to be my own master and not the tool of any
blundering universal force. I know that beauty is good to look at; that music is good to hear; that love is good to feel;
and that they are all good to think about and talk about. . . . Whatever they say of me in churches on earth, I know that
it is universally admitted in good society that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman; and that is enough for me. . . . But
if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle
water on babies to save their souls for me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies
from the water sprinkling and innoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take
to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchmen of ambitious humbugs; and the end
will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and
sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better
before he has secured the good.
DON JUAN. But at least I shall not be bored.
THE STATUE [consoling her] .
. . Written over the gate here are the words "Leave every hope behind, ye who enter." Only think what a relief that is! For
what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained
by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.
DON JUAN. Because hell, Señora, is a place for the wicken. The wicked are quite comfortable in it: it was made for
them. You tell me you feel no pain. I conclude you are one of those for whom Hell exists.
THE OLD WOMAN. Do you feel
no pain?
DON JUAN. I am not one of the wicked, Señora; therefore it bores me, bores me beyond description, beyond
belief.
"I guess unrequited love is a bed of nails I don't want to spend my life lying on."
"That bad."
"No.
At first it's the mere feat of it, you know? The fact that you're doing it, the adrenaline gets you through. But after that
--"
"After that, you start to feel the nails."
"Yup."
"I like the way the morning can be stormy and the afternoon
clear and sparkly as a jewel in the water. Put your hand in the water to reach for a sea urchin or a sea shell, and the thing
desired never quite lies where you had lined it up to be. The same is true of love. In prospect or contemplation, love is
where it seems to be. Reach in to lift it out and your hand misses"
"I remember once walking out hand in hand
with a boy I knew, and it was summer, and suddenly before us was a field of gold. Gold as far as you could see. We knew we'd
be rich forever. We filled our pockets and out hair. we were rolled in gold. we ran through the field laughing and our legs
and feet were coated in yellow dust, so that we were like golden statues or golden gods. He kissed my feet, the boy I was
with, and when he smiled he had a gold tooth.
It was only a field of buttercups, but we were young"
"May she
wake in torment!" he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable
passion. "Why, she's a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there - not in heaven - not perished - where? Oh! you said you cared
nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer - I repeat it till my tongue stiffens - Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest,
as long as I am living! You said I killed you - haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe - I know that
ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where
I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"
A friend is one who knows who you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you become, and still gently invites
you to grow.
Life cycles always anew, and we must strive to harness its whirlwind. In this we find peace and contentment. In contentment,
we are rich.
I humbly propose to you that the wisened individual holds no prejudices, but keeps the mind ever an open receptacle. In
this, we strive to lift the veils from our eyes and find contentment. In contentment, we are rich.
Some must walk the path of shadows to shelter those who transverse the light. It is balance we seek.
Life is what you make it, so make it a blast! Happiness is not a destination, it's a way of life!
Ability can take you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.
A bird does not sing because it has an answer -- it sings because it has a song.
A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
All sunshine makes a desert
"A long life may not be good enough, but a good life is long enough."
- Benjamin Franklin -
A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a person perfected without trials.
You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your
hair.
Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one
"The less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything."
- Joyce Cary -
"The more one penetrates the realm of knowledge the more puzzling everything becomes."
- Henry Miller -
Your mind and body have great power to accept things as they are, whether agreeable or disagreeable.
The value in money is not in having it, but in using it wisely.
The ones for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the
same time, who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like
spiders across the stars. --Jack Kerouac
"The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn."
- H.G. Wells
"Once the scent caught me on the street in Greenwich Village. i stopped in my tracks and looked around. Where was
it coming from? A shop? The trees? A passerby? I could not tell. I only know the smell made me cry. I stood on the sidewalk
in Greenwich Village as people brushed by, and felt suddenly young and terribly open, as if I were waiting for something.
I live in an ocean of smell, and the ocean is my mother."
- Rebecca Wells
"We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking, only to learn that it is God who is shaking them."
- Charles C. West
"A woman kicking ass is sexy. Always."
- Joss Whedon
"We are all in the gutter. But some of us are looking up at the stars."
- Oscar Wilde
"I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked, and being really good all the time."
- Oscar Wilde
"It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are either charming or tedious."
- Oscar Wilde
"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things
one never regrets are one's mistakes."
- Oscar Wilde
"Do you think God gets stoned? I think so...look at the Platypus."
- Robin Williams
"See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time."
- Robin Williams
"How can one weigh and shape dialogue till each sentence tears shingles in the bottom of the reader's soul?"
- Virginia Woolf
"I read the book of Job last night. I don't think God comes out well in it."
- Virginia Woolf
"Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating
it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of misiries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall)
do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliment for that very reason: they love life. In people's
eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich
men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triump and the jingle and the strange high singing of some
aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June."
- Virginia Woolf
"Samson loved her. It's a big deal for the Bible to say that. I think she loved him too. But she was an independant
gal, and the men come and go when that's who you are. Who can tell who among them might just be so good and faithful and true
that he's the one person that you shouldn't, say, kill with an ice pick. It's hard to know what to do. History brands you
betrayer when really it's just that you were thinking: Why should men get to have all the fun?"
- Elizabeth Wurtzel
"We may never, in the mundame monotony of our daily lives, know what it's like to be cut down to so little, to be
reduced to such a slight fragment of our own humanity that we are forced to use all that we have, to find the liveliest force
within what little is left -- and to accept that the only choice that has still been granted us is whether to be bitter or
gracious."
- Elizabeth Wurtzel
"I start to think that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn't one I'll have to fight for as long
as I live."
- Elizabeth Wurtzel
"And then there are my friends, and they have their own lives. While they like to talk everything through, to analyze
and hypothesize, what I really need, what I'm really looking for, is not something I can articulate. It's nonverbal: I need
love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere,
but I just can't feel it."
- Elizabeth Wurtzel
Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum.
Grata superveniet quae non sperabitur hora.
the greatest thing you will ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. ~Moulin Rouge
He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscoius
of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice.
~DeLillo
Don't you see yourself in every picture you love? You feel a radiance wash over you. It's something you can't analyze
or speak about clearly. What are you doing at that moment? You're looking at a picture on a wall. That's all. But it makes
you feel alive in the world. It tells you yes, you're here. And yes, you have a range of being that's deeper and sweeter than
you know.
~DeLillo
You will never discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Nothing you can do can be a mistake if you make it a learning experience
Work like you don't need the money, love like youve never been hurt, dance like no one is watching, and live as though
its your last day on earth
Challenges are what makes life interesting, overcoming them is what makes life meaningful
What doesn't kill you can only make you stronger.
I may sit in prison but I, too, exist, I see the sun; and if I do not see the sun, I know that it is. And to know that
the sun is -- that alone is the whole of life.
-- Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you've done it you can't say clearly if that was what you'd wanted or
just something that happened to you, like weather.
-from 'Fire' by Joyce Carol
The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.
I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts. . . . I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their
own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them. . . . Will you believe me? . . . there is hardly a person present who
would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry,
but by a sort of genius and inspiration.
-Plato, Apology
"I do like knowing you," I said, stammering. Really, I was trying to say something much more difficult--that
through her, as through a window, I could see the love that was woven through every fiber of the world.
--Monica Furlong, Wise Child
"happiness could be found in a grain of sand from the desert, as the alchemist had said. Because a grain of sand
is a moment of creation, and the universe has taken millions of years to create it."
~Coelho, The Alchemist
We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand...and melting like a snowflake. Let us use it before it is
too late.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay ~
Everybody lived for himself only, for his own pleasure, and all the talk about God and righteousness was an illusion.
And if sometimes doubts arose in her mind and she wondered why everything was so badly arranged in the world that everyone
was so wicked to each other and hurt each other, it was better not to think of it. When you feel depressed have a cigarette
or a drink, or best of all, make love, and it will pass.
~Tolstoy
every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man. ~tagore
You can send a message around the world in 1/5 of a second, yet it may take years for it to get from the outside of a
man's head to the inside. ~Kettering
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had
nothing else in the universe to do. ~Galileo
From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, make a life.
If you had to die, Jimmy thought, if such things really are preordained, then I wish that somehow you could have died
looking into my face. It would have hurt me to watch you die, Katie, but at least I would know that you felt a little less
alone looking into my eyes.
I love you. I love you so much. I love you, in truth, more than I loved your mother, more than I love your sisters, more
than I love annabeth, so help me God. And I love them deeply, but I love you most because when I came back from prison and
sat with you in the kitchen, we were the last two people on earth. Forgotten and unwanted. And we were both so afraid and
confused and so utterly fucking forlorn. But we rose from that, didn't we? We built our lives into something good enough so
that one day we weren't afraid, we weren't forlorn. And I couldn't have done that without you. I couldn't have. I'm not that
strong.
You would have grown into a beautiful woman. A beautiful wife, maybe. A miracle of a mother. You were my friend, Katie.
You saw my fear, and you didn't run. I love you more than life. And missing you will be my cancer. It will kill me.
-from "Mystic River" by Dennis Lehane
"reality was never my forte, but neither was was-/insanity, our beauty."
"Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
And maybe knowing isn't the point.
Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything."
-Chuck Palahniuk
"Up in the wind is a scavenging of gulls, sliding, easy, side to side, wings hung out still, now and then a small
shrug, only to gather lift for this weaving, unweaving, white and slow faro shuffle off invisible thumbs. . . . Yesterday's
first glance, coming along the esplanade in the afternoon, was somber: the sea in shades of gray under gray clouds, the Casino
Hermann Goering flat white and the palms in black sawtooth, hardly moving"
~Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon
"The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plain blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how
do you pray to that?"
~white oleander
"That's just what life is when it is beautiful and
happy- a game! naturally, one can also do all kinds
of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a
battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it
any prettier."
~Hesse
So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all plus cest la meme chose, plus ca change. Nothing endures,
not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.
~A separate Peace
"No; I only think you cruel, as I said the other day. Maybe not intentionally cruel; but you seem to be forcing me
into disclosures which can result in nothing; as if you would have me bare a wound for the pleasure of looking at it, without
the intention or power of healing it."
"'The proof of the little prince's existence is that he was delightful, that he laughed, and that he wanted a sheep.
When someone wants a sheep, that proves he exists...."
Are they consciously saving one unit of society? Are they freeing a human being as one might free a horse, after computing
the work he is capable of doing? Ten other miners may be killed in the attempted rescue: what inept cost accounting! Of course
it is not a matter of saving one ant out of the colony of ants! They are rescuing a consciousness, an empire whose significance
is incommensurable with anything else.
"Sophie, every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith-- acceptance of that which
we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory, and exaggeration,
from the early Egyptians through modern Sunday school. Metaphors are a way to help our mind process the unprocessible. The
problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors."
~The Davinci Code
TROTSKY: It gives you a little hope about the world, doesn't it? That a man could have a mountain-climber's axe smashed
into his skull, and yet live on for one whole day . . . ? Maybe I'll go look at the nasturtiums.
"The hardest thing about being a bulder, " said Jennie, "even a bulder very far from home, is that, if
you don't want to be lonely, you have to love a man."
"So love me. Stay with me," said Shadow. "Please."
"You," she said, sadly and finally, "are not a man."
- The Monarch of the Glen - Neil Gaiman
"God, I love this." She splashed gently with her fingers, letting her body drift in a slow circle. "Isn't
it funny. I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love
uses you. Changes its mind." Her eyes were closed. Beads of water decorated her face, and her hair spread out from her
head like jellyfish tendrils. "But hatred, now. That's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard or soft, however
you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you. It's so soothing. I feel infinitely better now."
~White Oleander, Janet Fitch
Those who think they know everything, are very annoying to those of us who do.
-Mark Twain
There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually
unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal."
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape
from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these
things.
--T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
"it's funny but on good days i dont think of her so much. in fact never. i never just say hi when the sun is on my
tongue and my belly's all warm. on bad days i talk to Death constantly, not about suicide because honestly that's not dramatic
enough. most of us love the stage, and suicide is definitely your last performance, and, being addicted to the stage, suicide
was never an option--plus people get to look you over and stare at your fatty bits and you cant cross your legs to give that
flattering thigh angle and thats depressing.
~tori amos
people disappoint themselves so much but they can't escape themselves and so they learn to shrug it off. we have an infinite
degree of forgiveness, out of necessity
"And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far in the future you will gradually,
without noticing it, live your way into the answer." -- Rainer Maria Rilke
"...And that's the reason for most suicides. Someone is torturing you. You want to kill them, but you can't. All
that pain is because you love them, and you can't kill them because you love them. So you kill yourself instead."
'Tis very strange Men should be so fond of being thought wickeder than they are.
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want
sin."
"In fact" said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
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