"We know how to say many false things that seem like true sayings, but we know also how to speak the truth when we with to." - Theogony - Hesiod trans. Richmond Lattimore
“This, this sort of life, where every nerve in my body was alive. How it was always different and never knowing how it would be, and then it happening, and being able to say – that was me.” - A Very Nice Girl - Imogen Crimp
“The truth was, I hated my parents coming to hear me. They always focused insistently on the wrong things – how long it would take to drive there, how much the tickets cost, whether there’d be an interval to go to the loo – and the whole experience was diminished, became mundane and ordinary, and then I’d feel guilty for thinking that, which made it even worse. ” - A Very Nice Girl - Imogen Crimp
“It’s a mistake to be passive about your future, Anna. To assume things will just work out.” - A Very Nice Girl - Imogen Crimp
“I find it incredible – Mil was saying – that men still expect women to be on the pill. That when you ask them if they’ve got a condom, they’re all like – oh, but you’re on the pill, aren’t you? – kind of incredulous, as if it’s your duty as a woman to make your vagina as welcoming as possible, just in case some random man might want to enter it.” - A Very Nice Girl - Imogen Crimp
“In other words, I am here as a direct result of being me. In this instance it has been expensive and tiring, being me, but I don’t regret it.” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“Never again!’ we say, after a move, feeling like we have been slowly backed over three times by a large tractor with tyres caked in hot manure. But after a while, the details of exactly why it was so traumatic fade. ‘Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all?’ we think. But it was. Probably worse, in fact. Our memory is lying to us. ” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“It’s hard for people to keep their masks on when they’re mid-move. Movers see people stretched and fraught. They see a full flame ignited under stories that have been left on simmer for years.” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“I love the plants, and wouldn’t want to be without them, even though they don’t make moving any easier, and merely living with them is a much finer art than you assume, at times feeling like hosting a party attended by fourteen quiet but oddly high-maintenance friends, all of which you must keep constantly happy.” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“It was as if many of the complexities of my life had floated away, and I was realising my essential core being for the first time, which was just a transient collection of experiences and opinions and hopes, blundering along to the next destin-ation, maybe picking up a few more along the way.” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“A lady with a busy sleeve of tattoos was telling a friend about another friend who had fallen out with her because the friend claimed she ‘didn’t text regularly enough’. The lady with the busy sleeve of tattoos said she had done nothing wrong apart from not wanting to be on her phone all day. ‘Exactly!’ I thought, already over-involved.” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“In this light, from this perspective, it was like looking at a scene concocted by an imagination obsessed with a time that will never be.” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“It was indicative of a lesson I had learned about walking: that a mistake or a wrong turn was something to be embraced, an experience not always synonymous with only failure and frustration.” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“It was not so much that I had lost my natural compass, more that the entire concept of compasses had evaporated, and I became under the impression this would now be my habitat forever more: a psychedelic space walled in by trees on all sides.” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“I was not telling an untruth: everything is research, if you want it to be.” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“The pheasant, I realised, was the one my landlady had told me about, whom she called Clarence. She talked about what a mystery his singleness was, especially in view of his appearance, and when I saw him I puzzled over the matter too, but then I realised this made me one of those people who assume that everyone who is single is desperately looking for love, without taking into account that some enjoy their own company, are very content in a single state and don’t view it as a position of intrinsic sadness.” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“I plan some of my walks in advance but an increasing number get scheduled on the day they happen, in a burst of scattershot inspiration, like the walk is a verse I’d been waiting to write but couldn’t, until inspiration struck.” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“I often get a strong sensation of missing stuff at this time of year – people, places – but I know a large amount of it is often an illusion” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“My timing was all out anyway: I wasn’t hungry and, as anybody who has accrued any life wisdom knows, you should never go to a supermarket when you’re either very hungry or not hungry at all. Super-markets are to be negotiated only when experiencing a medium level of hunger.” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“There was a sense that nature was rubbing its eyes and waking up but in the way that you might wake up with the first daylight, only to realise it’s not daylight at all but a new streetlamp that has been installed needlessly by the council on the pavement outside your bedroom window.” - Ring the Hill - Tom Cox
“The goal was won. Best he didn’t ruin it over trivialities.” - The Naturalist Society - Carrie Vaughn
“But sometimes, for a moment, I forget that I’m not on summer break. I think I’m going back to college. And then I remember it’s over. This is it. This is my life.” - The Book of George - Kate Greathead
“Happiness, or at least their version of it, came easily to these men for whom life was a game. Money was the prize, and they were the winners.” - The Book of George - Kate Greathead
“Then there’s me, working at the convenience store. I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but they could’ve lured me into an unmarked white van with the promise of free rent, beer, and a pack of cigarettes.” - An Academy for Liars - Alexis Henderson
“He didn’t know how precious a normal life could be, how easy it was to drift away from average. You started sleeping until noon, skipped one class, one day of school, lost one job, then another, forgot the way that normal people did things. You lost the language of ordinary life. And then, without meaning to, you crossed into a country from which you couldn’t return. You lived in a state where the ground always seemed to be slipping from beneath your feet, with no way back to someplace solid.” - Ninth House - Leigh Bardugo
"Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men." - from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," by Jorges Luis Borges
"One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe - and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives - is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men." - from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," by Jorges Luis Borges
"The fact that no one believes in the reality of nouns paradoxically causes their number to be unending." - from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," by Jorges Luis Borges
"At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, and irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally." - from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," by Jorges Luis Borges
“Let me tell you a story.” Tree touches the next stool. I take the seat, a reluctant RSVP. Salmon entrée, please. Only there is no wedding food, no boiled prom vegetables. Just Tree and her ghoulish skinned-alive mannequin in a fantasy science classroom from bubblegum hell.” - youthjuice - EK Sathue
“Which is to say, I would date me for the apartment, too.” - youthjuice - EK Sathue
“We go on like this for a while, debating the ethics of threatening to bash an employee’s head in and bottle the juices for a limited-edition flavor. Most of us agree the obvious hyperbole makes it a non-issue. Satire, we agree, is a lost art among the younger generation.” - youthjuice - EK Sathue
“By the end of that first week, I was spending every spare moment alone in the library, reading doggedly, trying to cram my head so full of new information there would be no room for doubt or fear or longing for my family. The library, at least, I could always find, standing as it did in the very centre of Camford, and its books welcomed me with open arms. I tried to tell myself I didn’t need anyone else.” - The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door -
H. G. Parry
“Her face was striking, cool and pale and oval-shaped—detached, I might have said, had it not been for the large dark eyes that glimmered with mischief. There was a sense of fun lurking beneath them that might be equally likely to turn on you or draw you in, and it invited you to try and see what you got.” - The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door -
H. G. Parry
“He doesn’t usually speak to new people, you know. I think he’s mistaken you for a vegetable.” - The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door -
H. G. Parry
“Please don’t mind him,” Hero said tolerantly. “He has a new favourite word.” - The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door -
H. G. Parry
“There, young mages are taught to respect magic as a force of nature, to be navigated and not tamed. We go into it with our eyes and minds open, the way mariners set sail into the ocean—respectful of its power, knowing that not all will come back.” - The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door -
H. G. Parry
“I’m glad you decided to come home.”
I laugh. “Well, I was running out of cities.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I like to think you’ve just come to your senses.”
Maybe in Another Life - Taylor Jenkins Reid
“literature, literature with a capital L, reflects the human heart and, pardon my French, but the human heart is a goddamn mess and sure, anyone can find a book nowadays written by those who’ve entered literature through the front door and these books are clean and clever, tempting and tidy, but where’s the blood, I asked, where’s the viscera, I also asked, because those who enter literature through the front door confuse intelligence with passion, confuse knowledge with soul” - Lesser Ruins - Mark Haber
“anyone who’d read the same book would’ve read an entirely different book because literature, I always thought, was a wordless prayer, even though it’s made up entirely of words, I thought, still, it’s more akin to a wordless prayer, to transcendence and euphoria or, if not euphoria, then at least the pursuit of euphoria” - Lesser Ruins - Mark Haber
“at some point you have to step away from the work, step away and shrug, washing your hands of the piece: a painting, a poem, a play, whatever it is, and say with utter finality: this was the best I could do because creating a work of art is no different than walking a tightrope or skating across the blade of a knife and if you dawdle or second-guess or rearrange too much, the original idea, the seed and inspiration of that idea is molested” - Lesser Ruins - Mark Haber
“since my passion was strange and unfamiliar, not just my passion but passion in general because my students were unaccustomed to fierce and fervent feelings, acquainted instead with lives awash with vapid interruption and, as I said, if they weren’t having their thoughts interrupted they were expecting to have their thoughts interrupted, thus my students were sitting in anticipation of having their thoughts interrupted” - Lesser Ruins - Mark Haber
“Coffee is an idea creator rather than an idea destroyer; coffee gives one mental lucidity and the confidence crucial for any intellectual campaign” - Lesser Ruins - Mark Haber
“the closet smelled, not of my dead wife’s perfume or my dead wife’s scent or my dead wife’s being, but all three, it smelled of my dead wife entire, as if my dead wife hadn’t died, as if she’d only stepped out for an errand and would be returning any second, and how could a person die but the essence of their existence remain” - Lesser Ruins - Mark Haber
“we’re getting worse at responding to surveys in general. Economists are upset about this, so they’ve studied it.” - Ultra-Processed People -
Chris van Tulleken
“she ignores me except to call me a floozy in Hungarian when I shelved Karl Marx under Fairy Tales.” - The Briar Club - Kate Quinn
"I don't know where I'm stuck, but I want to break free. I wish I was genuinely happy...to say yes, this is what life is all about." - My Liberation Notes, e4
“When it’s quiet in my head like this, that’s when the voice doesn’t need to tell me how pathetic I am. I know it in the deepest part of me. When it’s quiet like this, that’s when I truly hate myself.” - Unbearable Lightness - Portia de Rossi
“I stopped at 7-Eleven on the way home for food. I barely felt any anxiety as I pulled into the parking lot because I think I’d subconsciously planned this stop from my first bite of nachos. As I’d already blown the diet, I figured I might as well keep going—I might as well eat all the things I’d denied myself for the last few weeks. And I had to get it all done in one sitting because if I allowed myself to do this again—to eat all this food—I’d get fat.” - Unbearable Lightness - Portia de Rossi
"Better the devil I knew than the devil I didn't. Also, better the devil that didn't have lots of guns pointed at me than the devil that did. Really there were a lot of devils that were preferable to the kind that had lots of guns pointed at me." - source
“even going so far as to submit a sketch of my proposed project:
It would be a life-sized tallow sculpture, depicting a white-toqued baby Jesus, with knife and steel in his tiny hands, held by an adoring Madonna. Needless to say, my beef-fat Madonna horrified the graduation committee. Rather than offend my disturbingly sincere, if quirky, religious beliefs, they scotched the whole display. An animal-fat Sistine Chapel was not something they wanted all those parents and dignitaries to see. ” - Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
“Even her feet seemed to rebel at the confinement of shoes, and she became obsessed with the impulse to remove them, even in the theater or at the concert. A sighing habit developed. It had been growing for years into an air-hunger, and finally all physical, and much of mental, effort developed a sense of suffocation which demanded short periods of absolute rest.” - Our Nervous Friends - Robert S. Carroll
“Each year she became more truly a sensitive-plant, suffering and keenly alive to every discomfort, more and more easily fatigued by the conflicts between emotions, which craved expression, and the will, which demanded repression.” - Our Nervous Friends - Robert S. Carroll
"We take a short detour from our parade to inform you. I tend to obsess wrongly. The twists and turns of my life make me exceeding joy or despicable, and concealed within/expressed without through dramatic theatrics. I fear that my presence is incorrectly interpreted as it should be, noone understands me least of all me. This site is a form for filling with projected intent, so that I can observe and clarify my own disease. I am a very conflicted person. Enjoy!" - lotus-cube
“Besides, the appeal of Nature is to the Emotions; and words are weak things (save in the hands of a great Poet) by which to convey or to evoke emotion. Words seem to be the vehicles rather of ratiocination than of emotion.” - Of Walks and Walking Tours: An Attempt to find a Philosophy and a Creed - Arnold Haultain
“Some foolish men—probably poets—have sought for and asserted the existence of the ideal girl. This is sheer nonsense: there is no such thing. And if there were, she could not compare with the real girl, the girl of flesh and blood—which (as some one ought to have said) are excellent things in woman.” - Hints for Lovers - Arnold Haultain
“A girl is an infinite puzzle, and it is this puzzle, that, among other
things, tickles the men, and rouses their curiosity. What a man doesn't know about a girl would fill a Saratoga trunk; what
her does know about her would go into her work-box.” - Hints for Lovers - Arnold Haultain
“Is not a half-hearted love, or a half-hearted acceptress of love, a contradiction in terms?” - Hints for Lovers - Arnold Haultain
“Dissemblance is indeed at once the boon and the bane of a girl: without it, she thinks to be overlooked (often enough a preposterous assumption); with it, she is looked upon too much. And always, Always a girl has to pretend that never did she descend to dissemblance.—Which, nevertheless, is sometimes absolutely true” - Hints for Lovers - Arnold Haultain
“It is marvelous how a woman contrives to find something to look up to in a man.” - Hints for Lovers - Arnold Haultain
“The pedestal upon which a man places a woman (a man always puts a woman upon a pedestal) is a pedestal erected solely by the effect upon himself of her charms.” - Hints for Lovers - Arnold Haultain
“In matters of emotional finesse the masculine instance is nowhere: it is blinded, befogged, befooled at every turn. Heaven help the man who is dragged into a quarrel between two wrathful ladies!” - Hints for Lovers - Arnold Haultain
“They say a woman cannot argue. Hear her explain an indiscretion!” - Hints for Lovers - Arnold Haultain
“Man calls woman capricious simply because he is too stupid to comprehend the laws by which she is swayed. Woman does not call man capricious. —The inference is obvious.” - Hints for Lovers - Arnold Haultain
"I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him." - Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse (trans. ?)
"with the Earth by which I mean that for some time now I have been constantly conscious of this connectedness, whereas they were merely babbling nonsense, unconscious of what they were saying, letting words flutter this way and that, without anything to back them up, and, trying to pounce upon one thing or another, these reporters and grad students were just spouting a flurry of empty words" - Spadework for a Palace - Laszlo Krasznahorkai
"people love to discover so-called interconnections, they’re always contriving them, so to hell with them" - Spadework for a Palace - Laszlo Krasznahorkai
"I couldn't help but cringe seeing my own post there -- "the crystalline constraints he hewed to for most of Chesscourt proper"? I'm not sure it's possible to cram "I need a life" into fewer words." - The Northern Cave
"I hate all the arts!" you say. My dear sir, I respect you more and more. - How to Live on 24 Hours a Day - Arnold Bennett
One may have spent one's time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with it, however ill-advised that something may have been - How to Live on 24 Hours a Day - Arnold Bennett
He persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as "the day," to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue. Such an attitude, unconscious though it be, of course kills his interest in the odd sixteen hours, with the result that, even if he does not waste them, he does not count them; he regards them simply as margin - How to Live on 24 Hours a Day - Arnold Bennett
"Well," you say, "assume that I am braced for the battle. Assume that I have carefully weighed and comprehended your ponderous remarks; how do I begin?" Dear sir, you simply begin. - How to Live on 24 Hours a Day - Arnold Bennett
If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think, see that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in addition to those things which we are loyally and morally obliged to do. We are obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to pay our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our efficiency. A task sufficiently difficult! A task which very few of us achieve! A task often beyond our skill! Yet, if we succeed in it, as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; the skeleton is still with us. - How to Live on 24 Hours a Day - Arnold Bennett
Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself!
For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.
- How to Live on 24 Hours a Day - Arnold Bennett
"Sometimes I wondered if Batali was less a conventional cook than an advocate of a murkier enterprise of stimulating outrageous appetites (whatever they might be) and satisfying them intensely (by whatever means)." - Heat - Bill Buford
"Like the first time we dropped Ali off at kindergarten, oh god don’t remember that. The other parents all lined up talking like they already knew each other, like maybe there’d been an orientation or a parent party I’d missed. Even the kids all seemed to know each other. The hallway so full of people it was hard to move around and I couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t breathe. I mean, I could breathe, but it felt like I was stuffed inside of something." - The Guest Lecture - Martin Riker
"I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good, which would be a splendid thing, if it were so. Actually they have neither. They cannot make a man wise or stupid; they simply act at random." - Crito - Plato trans. Hugh Tredennick
"I am confusing her with another one. I am lost in time. I begged myself not to play this game, she is not that girl but some other one. Are they all the same? How many were there, can my fingers count that high? Memory is such an elusive thing. I had none until the letters arrived, and now I am like a man unleashed." - The End of Alice - A. M. Homes
"In his desperate depression he is making himself be what he thinks I want him to be—a lover." - The End of Alice - A. M. Homes
"Ink worm,” he says again. I shake my head as if to brush him from my thoughts. “You’re getting into something you won’t be able to get out of." - The End of Alice - A. M. Homes
"In situations like this when you finally have the name, you have the heart, the soul. Without ever touching, she is exploring him, feeling things, seeing how he will lie against her, gauging his weight, the sharpness of his bones." - The End of Alice - A. M. Homes
Sometimes I wish she would just stop. Not with me; with them. Sometimes I am so frustrated, so bored, so annoyed at how easily she is taken in, turned on, how she unabashedly sucks up this juvenile grotesque. This is not true child’s play, it has none of the charm of that. The gluttonous, consumptive moods of these boys to men, their constant testing of the limits, how much one can take, is so baldly adolescent, so pathetically pubescent, that it sends me up the walls. How can she be so blind?
I jot the shortest of postcards. Everything! Does not! Require an exclamation mark!
She is not stupid (I hope). She should want more, she should want the very best. I want the best for her. But it is a telling picture, the portrait of her across the street from them, her khaki shorts from last summer now snug in the derriere and in the thigh—she is, unfortunately, no longer just a girl, but also a woman, the body already dissolving from the tenderness of youth to the buttery bulk and sway, the free-flowing flesh of the fullest female. The notion of her crotch being heated, dampened, made warm and wet, by these boys disgusts me. I want it to require something more, something younger, something older, some greater mystery. I hate it when she is so damn obvious. Hate it to no end. I want to shake her, to slide my own gnarled, hairy, and arthritic five thick fingers between her legs and feel the heat, the high humidity, evaluate it for myself, and then bring her to her senses.
Cursing her openly, I’d slide my hand up that sleeve of khaki, whilst grabbing the flesh of her face between my teeth. Finger-fucking her, I’d bite her cheek, piercing it. I’d give her a sizable piece of my mind. I can afford it. God, they are so annoying when they believe they can think for themselves. - The End of Alice - A. M. Homes
"I will never answer a letter again. I will not allow myself to be put in this position, this begging pose. They have no idea of how important they are to us, they do not feel the power we allow them, do not recognize that with so small a gesture they are in our lives. No one realizes how little there is." - The End of Alice - A. M. Homes
"Getting better always starts in fantasy, in our imagining better lives for ourselves; it is the private utopianism of everyday life, the way we formulate our wishes, the way we picture our potential." - On Getting Better - Adam Phillips
"men who had thrown her bones and convinced her she should be grateful to lick them." - Disorientation - Elaine Hsieh Chou
"She looked forward to numbing herself into oblivion while zoning out before the TV. Goodbye problems, hello infinite void!" - Disorientation - Elaine Hsieh Chou
"She trusted Stephen. He was dependable, loyal, downright predictable. He wasn’t capable of something as interesting as adultery." - Disorientation - Elaine Hsieh Chou
"And yet, the way this person in a COLUMBUS WAS A MASS MURDERER sweatshirt was looking at her . . . Like she was in on the joke . . . Like she had been invited at long last to consort with the cool kids in the high school cafeteria . . . It was intoxicating." - Disorientation - Elaine Hsieh Chou
"It was—wow—what do I even say—I mean—those white people—am I right?” There—she had said it. The W word. Vivian would have to trust her now." - Disorientation - Elaine Hsieh Chou
"What a snide, holier-than-thou tone, Ingrid thought with unrestrained glee. The journal’s decision to publish such poppycock was inconceivable—academia’s standards were plummeting, to be sure. What ever happened to intellectual rigor? Was this a supermarket-aisle tabloid or a peer-reviewed article? The point wasn’t to titillate but to educate, even if it meant boring the reader to an early death! The new loosey-goosey state of academic publication was, she felt with no sense of hyperbole, sinful." - Disorientation - Elaine Hsieh Chou
"She understood, as did all her fellow PhD candidates, the endangered species status of a tenure-track position. The very mention of the word “tenure” transformed otherwise respectable students into cannibalistic fiends, ready to slaughter each other over the remaining scraps in academia." - Disorientation - Elaine Hsieh Chou
"She needed to kill time, as if it had a neck she could wrap her hands around until it produced, say, an original and convincing idea." - Disorientation - Elaine Hsieh Chou
“I don’t want my life to change,” I said. “I want my life to stay in one place and be one thing as intensely as possible.” - Y/N - Esther Yi
"Searching for something lost or missing, but I didn’t yet know who or what." - Drifts - Kate Zambreno
"How do you grieve a person like that? Someone who pinned you down for so long, yet also was the first to ever offer you a hand?" - Alison - Lizzy Stewart
"I found that there was so much time in a day if you gave it all to yourself. I didn't trust all the time I had. It seemed like a trick, that my days could be my own. Where was the catch?" - Alison - Lizzy Stewart
"What do you do with an offer like that, when you're twenty years old and have never really known the world or what you wanted?" - Alison - Lizzy Stewart
"Hobbies are only necessary if your life isn't interesting. And mine is." - Alison - Lizzy Stewart
"But sometimes worse can be so delicious, so enlivening that we'll take it, simply to have something to do." - Alison - Lizzy Stewart
“The teacher’s child ruined my Steinway in the shortest period imaginable, I wasn’t pained by this fact, on the contrary, I observed this cretinous destruction of my piano with perverse pleasure. Wertheimer, as he always said, had gone into the human sciences, I had begun my deterioration process. Without my music, which from one day to the next I could no longer tolerate, I deteriorated, without practical music, theoretical music from the very first moment had only a catastrophic effect on me.” - The Loser - Thomas Bernhard trans. Jack Dawson
“in the end he wasn’t satisfied with being (in the best of cases!) another piano virtuoso like all the others in Europe, and he gave it all up, went into the human sciences.” - The Loser - Thomas Bernhard trans. Jack Dawson
“I will now devote myself to philosophical matters, I thought as I walked to the teacher’s house, even though of course I didn’t have the faintest idea what these philosophical matters might be.” - The Loser - Thomas Bernhard trans. Jack Dawson
“The prospective suicides ride the elevator inside the mountain to the top, take a few steps and hurl themselves down to the city below. Their smashed remains on the street have always fascinated me and I personally (like Wertheimer by the way!) have often climbed or ridden the elevator to the top of Monk’s Mountain with the intention of hurling myself into the void, but I didn’t throw myself off (nor did Wertheimer!). Several times I had already prepared myself to jump (like Wertheimer!) but didn’t jump, like Wertheimer. I turned back.” - The Loser - Thomas Bernhard trans. Jack Dawson
“The town of Salzburg itself, which today is freshly painted even in the darkest corners and is even more disgusting than it was twenty-eight years ago, was and is antagonistic to everything of value in a human being, and in time destroys it; we figured that out at once and took off for Leopoldskron.” - The Loser - Thomas Bernhard trans. Jack Dawson
“We study better in hostile surroundings than in hospitable ones, a student is always well advised to choose a hostile place of study rather than a hospitable one, for the hospitable place will rob him of the better part of his concentration for his studies, the hostile place on the other hand will allow him total concentration, since he must concentrate on his studies to avoid despairing” - The Loser - Thomas Bernhard trans. Jack Dawson
“he wouldn’t have had to misuse the human sciences, so to speak, as I misused philosophy, for just as I had misused philosophy or rather philosophical matters for decades, so Wertheimer had misused the so-called human sciences to the very end. He wouldn’t have written all those slips of paper, I thought, just as I wouldn’t have completed my manuscripts, those crimes against the intellect, as I thought while entering the inn.” - The Loser - Thomas Bernhard trans. Jack Dawson
“We try out all possible avenues and then abandon them, abruptly throw decades of work in the garbage can." - The Loser - Thomas Bernhard trans. Jack Dawson
“Wertheimer had to commit suicide, I told myself, he had no future left. He’d used himself up, had run out of existence coupons.” - The Loser - Thomas Bernhard trans. Jack Dawson
“he went to bed around four in the morning, not to sleep, said Glenn, but to let the sound of my exhaustion die out.” - The Loser - Thomas Bernhard trans. Jack Dawson
“His mother threw her child into this existence machine, all his life his father kept this existence machine running, which accurately hacked his son to pieces. Parents know very well that they perpetuate their own unhappiness in their children, they go about it cruelly by having children and throwing them into the existence machine, he said” - The Loser - Thomas Bernhard trans. Jack Dawson
“We run away from one thing into the other and destroy ourselves in the process, he said. We just simply go away until we have given up, so he said.” - The Loser - Thomas Bernhard trans. Jack Dawson
“From early childhood he had experienced the wish to die, to commit suicide, as they say, but never was totally concentrated. He could never come to terms with being born into a world that basically repulsed him in every detail from the very beginning. He grew older and thought that his wish to die would suddenly no longer be there, but this wish grew more intense from year to year, without ever becoming totally intense and concentrated.” - The Loser - Thomas Bernhard trans. Jack Dawson
"When he wasn’t preparing his masterwork, Jacov was circling the grounds, bellowing at the masons, demanding they reach toward God but an unsympathetic God, he implored, a cruel God, he cried, a God, he howled, whose voice was muted by the deafening roar of moronic humanity." - Reinhardt's Garden - Mark Haber
"Do you expect to survive or die here? Survive, I answered timidly, mostly because I was young and possessed a downy coat of optimism across my virgin soul" - Reinhardt's Garden - Mark Haber
"Melancholy, which doesn’t say anything but hints at everything, trenchant enough to make the greatest of men, Jacov for example, abandon all sorts of sundry life choices to dedicate their souls to the study and understanding and perhaps, when all is said and done, the grasping of this singular anguish." - Reinhardt's Garden - Mark Haber
"Inherently Ulrich understood this, and I suspected he was talking to me out of camaraderie, sensing my advance toward the land of the dead, and being a sensitive type beneath it all, he wanted to give my soul the solace of another voice." - Reinhardt's Garden - Mark Haber
"Yes, dramatic transformation occurs, but it’s not quite as dramatic as it looks. It is as though what haunts all religions – and then all secular therapies – is that the wish for change may be in excess of the capacity for change." - On Wanting to Change - Adam Phillips
"It is as though he is wanting something new to be asked of him that he cannot ask of himself; or, indeed, be asked by other people." - On Wanting to Change - Adam Phillips
"If the modern question is, as Michel Serres suggests, ‘What is it you don’t want to know about yourself?’, the pragmatic question that follows on from this is: what can you do with whatever it is you do and don’t want to know about yourself? One of the things we do and don’t want to know about ourselves is how we are unavoidably changing, and how we might want to change. There is, in our more modern, secular languages, the double life of biological destiny and self-invention, and the double life of what you think you know, and want to know, about yourself, and what you don’t want to know about yourself (what is conscious and what is, as yet, unconscious). What is being converted (and apparently cured) in conversion experiences are contradictions such as these. It is not, though, that the problem is solved; it is that to all intents and purposes it disappears. It ceases to be the issue that it was. As often happens in a psychoanalysis, people aren’t cured, they just lose interest in their symptoms. Their preoccupations fade, and evolve. The converted do and don’t have different preoccupations." - On Wanting to Change - Adam Phillips
“Before my performance, I experienced butterflies the size of small bats. Not only that, but I also slipped into an altered state of consciousness in which time was distorted and the laws of physics seemed to stop working. But to make a long story short, I survived the recital.” - A Guide to the Good Life - William Braxton Irvine
“Could hell be described as too much of anything without a break? Are variety, moderation and balance instruments we use to keep us from boiling in any inferno of excess,' whether it be cheesecake or ravenous sex?” - No Exit - Jean-Paul Sartre
“We — Uh, I,” said Carl, “am here to join up, too.”
“And me,” I agreed. “Both of us.” No, I hadn’t made any decision; my mouth was leading its own life.” - Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlein
“If you can’t listen, perhaps you can tell the class whether `value’ is a relative, or an absolute?”
I had been listening; I just didn’t see any reason not to listen with eyes closed and spine relaxed.” - Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlein
“Sometimes she thought no one was who they claimed to be, and she was trapped in the center of a spinning alien cosmos.” - Bad Girl in the Box - Tim Curran
“I was pulled however hither and yon by the stream of life or ideas, unable to pluck, unable to sort or sift one thing from another, thus the question of what my work was remained an open question, nothing in the other parts of my life having provided a model for or example of how I might close it, the smoking breaks closing the questions I could not answer at my job being not quite the thing.” - The Longcut - Emily Hall
“Logical conclusions rarely being of course available, still I tried. My rarely being able to bring any idea to a logical conclusion being more or less a point of fact.” - The Longcut - Emily Hall
“Thus the condition of having no category or known sequence of categories kept me from chucking the articles and objects but it did not prevent me entering a zone of not understanding what I was looking at, further keeping me in the zone of thinking about zones, even as I had found myself in or remained in those zones for years or more.” - The Longcut - Emily Hall
“was I fundamentally unserious, I was haunted by thinking, was my pursuit a joke, even as the border between serious work and joke-seeming work was transparent seeming and permeable, joke-seeming work being a zone easy to cross into without knowing it.” - The Longcut - Emily Hall
“my serious-seeming enquiry into the question of what my work was seeming to others to be flakiness, a failure to buckle down, to be dicking around” - The Longcut - Emily Hall
“What indeed if I buckled myself to the wrong thing or mistranslated a correct thing into the wrong material.” - The Longcut - Emily Hall
“They all became less interesting, being as they were, I then or eventually understood, in the wrong context, either viewed in the wrong zone or produced in the wrong zone, the conditions of secrecy and pilfering that had charged with energy the strips of paper from the shredder’s outflow bin not being possible to replicate in unstolen time in my so-called studio, not replicable by the torn-up sheets authorized by my boss with only the merest, relatively, it should be said, slant.” - The Longcut - Emily Hall
“It is our fundamental belief that readers have the freedom and the right to read and judge a text for themselves – that contentious works with artistic merit should not be erased from history simply for causing offence. Despite the controversy attached to this book, we have chosen to republish it in its original form.” - Penance - Eliza Clarke
“But mostly they were lies I told; it wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t remember, because it was as though I’d been to one of those supernatural castles visited by characters in legends: once away, you do not remember, all that is left is the ghostly echo of haunting wonder." - Truman Capote, quoted in Penance, by Eliza Clarke
"Or, to put it the other way round, this chapter is wondering how we can tell, when we change, whether or not we are being converted, and what that might involve as a picture of how we change and how we are changed. What kind of change is inevitable and what kind of change is possible in a life? We are the only animals for whom radical change can be an object of desire." - On Wanting to Change - Adam Phillips
"When we want to think of our lives as progress myths, in which we get better and better at realizing our so-called potential; or conversely as myths of degeneration – as about decay, mourning and loss (ageing as the loss of youth, and so on) – we are also plotting our lives. Giving them a known and knowable shape and purpose; providing ourselves with guidelines, if not blueprints, of what we can be and become. It is not that our lives are determined by our descriptions of them; but our descriptions do have an effect, however enigmatic or indiscernible it might be. And there is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it. There are, that is to say, the stories we tell about change, and how we actually do change, and they don’t always go, or come, together. This book, and its sequel, are about that fact." - On Wanting to Change - Adam Phillips
"And I cursed the very solitude I longed for because I didn’t want to be alone yet couldn’t stand anything but being alone." - Saint Sebastian's Abyss - Mark Haber
"what of that horrible thing I had said on that panel in New York? What the fuck was that about? It put everything into question, he wrote, everything I had ever said or done or written, and not only about Count Hugo Beckenbauer and Saint Sebastian’s Abyss but about art itself and friendship and technique as well as shadows and shifting light, doom and decay, really everything we’d ever cared about. And how, he’d asked in the email, could he ever trust his best friend when his best friend had uttered and later written the words of a complete stranger, a stranger evidently suffering from dementia or a mental disability, perhaps the words of a lowbrow or an ignoramus or a person who’d been struck on the head by a piece of wood or a metal pipe, yes, he’d written, a metal pipe, not quite unconscious but teetering toward unconsciousness, the blow was struck and there I was, a celebrated critic, blathering idiotically about the democracy of art criticism, how? Had everything been a farce, he’d demanded in his email, had everything been a falsehood, a fiction, were the past three decades, he’d asked, a fucking fabrication?" - Saint Sebastian's Abyss - Mark Haber
"These were the questions raised in Molyneaux’s book, questions Schmidt didn’t hesitate to say were beneath him and, being a strict formalist, questions he considered nonsense and ludicrously preposterous. These questions are ludicrously preposterous, he’d said, when all we have is the work itself, when what stands in front of us is the painting, nothing more, the painting itself enough to satisfy ten lifetimes of work by the greatest art critics in the world, so how can this pig and this dunce, meaning Tristan Molyneaux, write an entire book, meaning The Sins of Hugo’s Saints, not an essay or even an article but an entire book, about what he supposes Beckenbauer meant?" - Saint Sebastian's Abyss - Mark Haber
"You can’t create sublime art, Schmidt would say, eternal art, he’d add, if you believe there will be a tomorrow and I, ambling beside him, wholeheartedly agreed. One must paint, he said, believing the Antichrist is traipsing through the next village." - Saint Sebastian's Abyss - Mark Haber
"On our first visit though, tapping his temple, he’d said that a master’s work should touch the mind, not the heart. Leave the heart out of it, Schmidt had said, the moment the heart is involved you’re no longer a critic but a spectator and he’d said the word spectator as if it were the worst thing a person could ever be." - Saint Sebastian's Abyss - Mark Haber
"Their work, however, was anemic and bloodless, lacking the passion, some might say the obsession, that Schmidt and I had in spades." - Saint Sebastian's Abyss - Mark Haber
"Art is rare, we agreed, because humanity no longer produces artists; we live in a world of monotonous excrement or excremental monotony, we’d say, the difference being immaterial because the point being the world is awash with monotony while simultaneously overflowing with excrement, excrement and monotony bursting from every direction, a world that has not dulled or impaired but, in fact, annihilated the inspiration necessary to create artists, anything even remotely resembling the inspiration necessary to create artists has been wholly annihilated." - Saint Sebastian's Abyss - Mark Haber
"Still, I envisioned works greater than Saint Sebastian’s Abyss because while I sought and entertained the possible, Schmidt eschewed and cursed the possible, meaning he courted and invited the impossible." - Saint Sebastian's Abyss - Mark Haber
"Schmidt hated anything new or modern, art especially. I was from the United States, a relatively new country, said Schmidt. Schmidt was from Austria, which he called an ancient country. Whenever Schmidt and I argued, invariably about art and more specifically about Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, he would resort to calling the United States a second-rate nation and explain that, having been born and raised in the United States, unequivocally a second-rate nation, a lethargic infant of a society, a babbling baby of a drive-through culture, my opinions could only be infantile too, indulgent and crass and, like the United States, requiring centuries, perhaps epochs, to mature." - Saint Sebastian's Abyss - Mark Haber
"Later I too came to believe that Schmidt feigned his flood of emotions to demonstrate being touched more by Saint Sebastian’s Abyss than I was, thus confirming, at least in his mind, that his understanding of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss was deeper and more profound, to establish, at least in his mind, there were elements and details, emotions and subtleties in the work that escaped me." - Saint Sebastian's Abyss - Mark Haber
"He [John 'King' Oliver] was victimized by unscrupulous promoters; the number of bus breakdowns and accidents that plagued his bands exceeded credibility." - Introduction to Jazz History - Donald Megill
"He told me that to celebrate New Year’s Eve he gave a patron a blow job in the bathroom of his restaurant. He simply walked into the bathroom, saw a man having a piss in a stall, with the door open, and joined him. An hour later, the man left with his wife." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"Since I am not who I am, I must embrace the form that suits me best. Fielding’s seven-page essay took him twelve months to write. He was tackling an unimaginably large problem with unimaginable concision. I was finishing my essays as fast as I could type them. He spent a year making sure there was nothing dispensable in his writing, and that nothing was repeated. I repeat myself with recklessness, and since I am the subject, and I am dispensable, there is nothing I say that is essential. He is precise; I am erratic. He refines; I pollute." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"I re-establish the boundaries of the world. All my memories are adjusted, like a man going through a slightly vandalized museum of natural history, repositioning, standing a few displays back on their feet, dusting, polishing." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"A man who writes loves his city more than his own life or death – a failed writer all the more. The city inspires him, but refuses to belong to him. It endures all his nonsense. It does not requite his obsession." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"My brain is exhausted. It is like this every night. I would like to say everything, but I can’t think to remember any of it. I will go downstairs and sleep without reading. The corpse of what I could say now, if I had the energy, tumbles into lost time, on top of all the others." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"I remember nothing of the conversation except my surprise that it was taking place." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"But I am finished fighting. To commit an act of violence on art or abandon it: it is the same thing. I want to eliminate art from my concerns, so that I rid myself of small thoughts. I will live and create wholly. A man who does this – and perhaps I will never be this man – re-emerges from the fraudulence and carnage asymmetrical, ugly, and contradictory, and lives as a totality, himself. I love the disfigured, the monstrous. All the books I admire are ogres – flawed, imbalanced, savage. They enhance me. Everything else reduces me." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"She had her hand on my leg. I cannot remember if it had been there from the beginning. We were sitting in an odd calm that seemed a great distance from everybody else. We were all alone in the room. I have a tendency – and this is an old cliché but what can you do when it’s the truth – to fall in love with strippers. I’ve never been to a club without leaving under a hazy, pathetic crush." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"I had driven them a thousand times during the period of my life in which every thought was a heart-pulverizing epiphany, but I felt nothing, not even the warm vacuity that fills the shells of old epiphanies. I was there for the first time, with that amnesiac pain of knowing it ought to mean something." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"I write in order to annihilate the mystery and magnitude of places in my memory, to exorcize their possession of me. Driving through the landscape, past the shopping supercomplexes by the highway, none of which existed in my childhood – the city now stretches inconceivably outward, repetitively, serving no purpose beyond enlarging the dominion of convenience – I felt a grey and painless repulsion. It had nothing to do with unfamiliarity. It would be alien with or without the sprawl. I can never hope to experience it. I have destroyed it." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"He was the most talented writer I’d come across in a year of teaching, but it hadn’t come together for him, and now, I knew, he was going to quit. His decision to commit murder on his talent was something I remorsefully admired – I had played a decisive role in John’s disillusionment. I had passed on too freely my loathing for the propriety of being a writer, tried to help him find the pure and fearless voice of total disenchantment. During one of our conversations I said that a man who can write ought to commit an act of violence against literature or abandon it entirely. John had written three or four stories in his whole life." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"I am always hoping that one night she will give in to curiosity and fuck me. But women don’t seem to fuck men out of curiosity, at least not friends." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"I spent a whole decade cultivating rage. I laboured to disappoint. I infected the people I knew with bitterness. I pulled them in close and betrayed them. I felt no remorse, just pity. I left the tiny battlefields of my relationships scorched and full of smoking corpses. I walked over the bodies without examination."- A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"We all came together, or pretended to." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"She gives head with the enthusiasm you only find in good Catholics, and she, who usually doesn’t sleep with men she likes for months, lies around in the mornings wondering what has happened to her morals. She is nearly thirty but could pass for nineteen. This creates a funny incongruity – she is always saying things that seem too wise for her years." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"Within and around the edges of the pattern of my working day, I foist nothing upon the accidental nature of the world. My observations stand without the imposition of plots or meaning: I am not interested in fictions. I have used up all the characters in my head. They are all at the beach. They have walked off the pages of all my old stories and gone to Mexico. A lot of them swam out in the ocean and are dead. Those who remain hang around a bar and watch the sea all day. They move from job to job. The sun boils them. They fuck each other in dirty motel rooms. They go drinking and fall into gutters, where they lie unconscious for days, and in the rainy seasons, when the streets flood and the mud from the green mountain slops down like a fat brown tongue, their bodies float around like empty aluminium cans. This is the end of them, the Giudecca in the hell of the free self." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"Maybe one evening I’ll arrive in Vienna unannounced. I will find a small flat just outside the Ring – something I can afford for a little while – with a view of nothing much. I will go grocery shopping and read books; with diminishing impact I will live out the resurrection of a dead history." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"When I first arrived, I experienced such moments. They would arise for no reason, in unspecial settings, in the middle of daily routines. The feeling has no light or shape or colour, only, for a moment, a temperature. By the time you have named it, you have forgotten it. The imposition of a word is the act of forgetting. A man who wishes to transfer his experience to the page might as well try to throw a typewriter at the moon." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"After three years of working as a journalist, my life had become a junkyard of comforts." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"By the time I gave up the desire to write books that would annihilate society – which was nothing more than the desire to write myself back into society – I had almost nothing left of myself. I wasn’t a writer at all, just a slave to my own preoccupation with people who were published." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"I had become a resentful and jealous and desperate would-be writer in Louisiana, and I was that same man in Ireland. I woke every morning at dawn and put on three or four layers and a winter hat and bashed revisions into my first book. And when that failed I bashed a second book into existence. No thought I had was quiet. Everything was a military march. I could not imagine a fate of anonymity – life was meaningless without impact. I believed that I could alter society. How pathetic that self seems to me now." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"Resentment, if you let it, will weave itself into your DNA, and replicate. Every cell in your body becomes it. You feel nothing authentically, and, if you are a writer, you produce reactionary trash. You must let go of the desire to bring down the society you loathe. You must learn to discard any hope of making a difference. You must stop asking dumb questions." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"The walk from Dame Street and Temple Bar to my office on Upper Ormond Quay takes you from a city – at least in daytime – that is clean and full of quirky cafés and small art galleries and oinking tourists to one that is grimy and dilapidated and full of lawyers and criminals and addicts orbiting the Four Courts. The Liffey is always murky and snotty, and if you are not feeling well it makes you want to vomit. And if the river does not make you want to vomit, then look along the quays, upon the sad and unambitious architecture of the city, and you will want to vomit." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"Nevertheless, the story had momentum, because the annihilation of ambition and entitlement is a process that deepens. You think you’ve told an eviscerating truth about yourself, but all you’ve done is discover the lie that it was founded on, so you tell a new truth, and so on, until there are no guts left to rip out. And that is the end." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"Eventually I got a job as a reporter on a weekly newspaper for doctors. This was a job I was not qualified for and did not want, yet I remain there today. I have tried quitting – serving verbal notice twice – and I have tried to get promotions, but my attempts at both were always half-hearted, and I always botched them." - A Preparation for Death - Greg Baxter
"Science benefits from its inclusion of the abstraction-addled, absent-minded professors, the control-freak obsessives, the cantankerous bean-counting statistics junkies, the congenitally contrarian devil’s advocates, the hard-nosed data-oriented literalists, and the starry-eyed romantics who embark on high-risk, high-payoff ventures, stumbling frequently along the way." - The Tell-Tale Brain - V. S. Ramachandran
"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes." - The Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley
"It's easier to do this when you're here. And that makes me feel stupid. Have I been sitting on my tail all this time? Doing nothing because I was pretending I couldn't? Am I so pathetic that I couldn't master the energy to do this without . . . without a chaperone?" - Bookshops & Bonedust - Travis Baldree
"Not gonna brag, but I was name-checked in my kindergarten teacher's suicide note." - (Gina, some episode of Brooklyn 99)
“I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked best could easily be described as "common decency." I treated somebody well for a little while, or maybe even for a tremendously long time, and that person treated me well in turn. Love need not have had anything to do with it.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“We were given very different sorts of minds at birth. Bernard could never be a writer. I could never be a scientist. And, since we make our livings with our minds, we tend to think of them as gadgets — separate from our awarenesses, from our central selves.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“I told my brother one time that whenever I did repair work around the house, I lost all my tools before I could finish the job.
"You're lucky," he said. "I always lose whatever I'm working on.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“We didn't belong anywhere in particular any more. We were interchangeable parts in the American machine.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“Exhaustion, yes, and deep money worries, too, made her say toward the end that she guessed that she wasn't really very good at life.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“I told him a remark which I had heard attributed to the writer Renata Adler, who hates writing, that a writer was a person who hated writing.
I told him, too, what my agent, Max Wilkinson, wrote to me after I complained again about what a disagreeable profession I had. This was it: "Dear Kurt — I never knew a blacksmith who was in love with his anvil."
We laughed again, but I think the joke was partly lost on my brother. His life has been an unending honeymoon with his anvil.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“It is a thing I often say these days: "Hi ho." It is a kind of senile hiccup. I have lived too long. Hi ho.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“I swear: If I live to complete this autobiography, I will go through it again, and cross out all the "Hi ho's."
Hi ho.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“I must be very careful with my drinking at my birthday party. If I drank too much, I might spill the beans to everybody: That the life that awaits us after death is infinitely more tiresome than this one.
Hi ho.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“He said to me, 'Money isn't going to make you feel any better, Sweetheart, but we're going to sue the piss out of your relatives anyway.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“Was it any good? Not really. It was only good enough to become, after The Bible and The Joy of Cooking, the most popular book of all time.
Hi ho.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“In my disoriented state, it seemed very important that I take two of the pills immediately, which I did.
Two minutes passed, and then my whole being was flooded with contentment and confidence such as I had never felt before.
Thus began an addiction which was to last for nearly thirty years.
Hi ho.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“So many crimes committed by lonesome people in Government are concealed in this place," I said, "that the inscription might well read, 'Better a Family of Criminals than No Family at All.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“Sophie — " I said, "that is not the general American population out mere. And you are not mistaken when you say that they have crawled out from under damp rocks — like centipedes and earwigs and worms. They have never had a friend or a relative. They have had to believe all their lives that they were perhaps sent to the wrong Universe, since no one has ever bid them welcome or given them anything to do."
"I hate them," she said.
"Go ahead," I said. "There's very little harm in that, as far as I know.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“QUESTION: What is God's Option?
ANSWER: He can destroy Mankind so easily, any time he chooses to.
Hi ho.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“What Eliza wanted from him was that he should die as soon as possible, so that the two of them could put their heads together. She wanted then to figure out ways to improve the utterly unsatisfactory, so-called "Paradise."
"Are you being tortured there?" he asked her.
"No," she said, "we are being bored stiff. Whoever designed this place knew nothing about human beings. Please, brother Wilbur," she said, "this is Eternity here. This is forever! Where you are now is just nothing in terms of time! It's a joke! Blow your brains out as quick as you can.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
“then he had his pilot fly him to Manhattan, the Island of Death. He intended to die there, to join his sister in the afterlife — as a result of inhaling and ingesting invisible Chinese communists.” - Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
The last of the can't make it Caucasians. (West Side Story (2022))
"Every day I’m a new person with a new perspective and new ideas. My computer and my desk become the ruins of a city inhabited for millennia by different civilizations, peoples, and races — who somehow are all contained within a single human body (my human body)." - saddleblasters
"I’m not creating a lovely world of my own that only I could understand, filled with the kind of cuteness our real world is lacking. I’m just accumulating cold white words and embedding them into infinite darkness." - saddleblasters
“as a rule, before he was fully awake, he still had the last and worst stage to go through. It consisted of a dizzy, shapeless feeling that this awakening was the real dream and that in fact he was stilllying on the damp stone floor of the dark cell, at his feet the can, next to his head the jug of water and a few crumbs of bread. ... This time also, for a few seconds, the bemused conditionheld, the uncertainty whether his groping hand would touch the can or the switch of his bedside lamp.” - Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler
“I did not applaud. Ignored by those around me, I finished my toast—not to Lady Philomel now, but to the enduring stupidity of my race—and downed the last of the champagne. It was flat.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Make no mistake,” he said. “We know…she knows…who you are and what you are and whom you represent.”
I met his gaze and calmly extracted my arm. “That’s good,” I said, “because at this point, I am quite sure that I do not know.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Literally millions of lobbyists, job seekers, would-be biographers, business people, fans of the CEO, and potential assassins would give almost anything to have a minute with the Hegemony’s most visible leader, a few seconds with CEO Gladstone, and I could see her “at my convenience.” No one ever said the universe was sane.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Father Lenar Hoyt of the twelve-hundred-year-old Society of Jesus, resident of the New Vatican on Pacem and loyal servant of His Holiness Pope Urban XVI, is screaming obscenities.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“In the long pageant of human history, I am sure that there has been some human male who could stand, surprised and naked, in front of two fully clothed and potentially hostile strangers, rival males as it were, without cringing, without having the urge to cover his genitals and hunch over, and without feeling totally vulnerable and at a disadvantage…but I am not that male.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Please shut up,” Brawne Lamia says tiredly. “If I have to shoot you, it will give us one more thing to carry. Just walk.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Tyrena was a dinosaur who refused to become extinct—her wrists, palms, and neck would have glowed blue from repeated Poulsens if it had not been for makeup, and she spent decades on short-hop interstellar cruises or incredibly expensive cryogenic naps at spas too exclusive to have names; the upshot was that Tyrena Wingreen-Feif had held the social scene in an iron grip for more than three centuries and showed no signs of relinquishing it. With every twenty-year nap, her fortune expanded and her legend grew.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“We have made some progress, thought Gladstone, despite the inertia forced upon us by the Core. Despite the near-death of science. Despite our fatal addiction to the toys granted us by our own creations” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Martin Silenus had been working on his Cantos for more than two standard centuries. His finest work had been done in these surroundings—the abandoned city, the desert winds whining like an ominous Greek chorus in the background, the ever-present threat of the Shrike’s sudden interruption. By saving his own life, by leaving, Silenus had abandoned his muse and condemned his pen to silence. Beginning work again, following that sure trail, that perfect circuit which only the inspired writer has experienced, Martin Silenus felt himself returning to life…veins opening wider, lungs filling more deeply, tasting the rich light and pure air without being aware of them, enjoying each stroke of antique pen across the parchment, the great heap of previous pages stacked around on the circular table, chunks of broken masonry serving as paperweights, the story flowing freely again, immortality beckoning with each stanza, each line.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Gentlemen and ladies, we should all be hanging from stanchions if the news is true.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“In order to save humanity from what she considered an eternity of slavery…or worse, extinction…she had been prepared to open the front door of the house to the wolf while most of the family hid upstairs, safe behind locked doors. Only now the day had arrived, and wolves were coming in through every door and window. She almost smiled at the justice of it, at her ultimate foolishness in thinking that she could uncage chaos and then control it.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Declaring war against the Core would be like…like a fish declaring war against water, like a driver attacking his EMV because of disturbing news of an accident elsewhere.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Was it a sin, he wondered, to plan deals with the Antichrist?” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“You couldn’t tell a straightforward tale if your stupid AI ass depended—
[Go away]
Ummon the AI megalith drops her, sending her analog tumbling and falling into the upless and downless crackling immensity of the megasphere.
Brawne is buffeted by data traffic, almost trod upon by AIs the size of Old Earth’s moon, but even as she tumbles and blows with the winds of dataflow, she senses a light in the distance, cold but beckoning, and knows that neither life nor the Shrike is finished with her.
And she is not finished with them.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“I looked down, fumbled out Gladstone’s override card, and tapped the three-digit code for Pacem. The portal apologized, said that it was not possible at the moment, finally got it through its microcephalic processors that this was an override card, and hummed into existence.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“I am no Dante. I sought no Beatrice.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“We were heading for the shelter…Chronos Keep,” says the Consul, trying not to sound too eager but at the same time grateful for each second he is allowed to live. Why? part of him thinks. You were tired of living. Ready to die. Not like this. Not while Sol and Rachel and the others need his help.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“The Bishop looked back at Duré and sneered. “We need tell you nothing, priest of a dead religion.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Meina Gladstone suddenly realized that the Core had the power of life and death over every farcaster-traveling citizen in the Web…which was every citizen with power. Leigh and the Severn cybrid did not have to be kidnapped, translated somewhere…only the persistent habit of thinking of farcasters as foolproof transportation created the subconscious conviction that they had gone somewhere. Her aide and the enigmatic cybrid could easily have been translated to…to nothing. To scattered atoms stretched through a singularity. Farcasters did not “teleport” people and things—such a concept was silly—but how much less silly was it to trust a device that punched holes in the fabric of space-time and allowed one to step through black hole “trapdoors”? How silly was it for her to trust the Core to transport her to the infirmary?” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“It is hard to be good-natured when one is dying; I had led a life of some generosity…why then was it my fate to continue that role when I was the one suffering, when I was the one coughing the ragged remnants of my lungs into stained handkerchiefs?” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“No.” Hunt thought that there was something odd about the young man’s gaze, as if Keats were looking at him but seeing someone else.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“The Poets’ City was no longer the Dead City.
Martin Silenus said the collective IQ had been higher when the place was deserted.” - The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
Here in the present day, I need a good bar to be sad in. Not because I am sad, you understand. That would be absurd. But because a sad man being sad in a sad bar is a phenomenon that I have heard of and I would very much like to play at for an evening. - In. - Will McPhall
'Artisanal Kick in the Back' has exceptional wifi and only one power outlet: a twisted game designed by the owners to turn desperate writers against each other. The coffee is free and instead they charge by the number of pages you write for your screenplay. - In. - Will McPhall
Every jaded businessman that I pass knows exactly what I was doing last night. My hair tells the whole seedy story, baby!
Except that part where I didn't feel anything and performed every emotion.
Baby. - In. - Will McPhall
“In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“The players have not been brought upon the stage. Dislinear plotting and noncontiguous prose have their adherents, not the least of which am I, but in the end, my friends, it is character which wins or loses immortality upon the vellum. Haven’t you ever harbored the secret thought that somewhere Huck and Jim are—at this instant—poling their raft down some river just beyond our reach, so much more real are they than the shoe clerk who fitted us just a forgotten day ago? At any rate, if this fucking story’s to be told, you should know who’s in it. So—as much as it pains me—I’ll back up to begin at the beginning.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“You might already be able to tell that I was born with a silver spoon up my ass. I offer no apologies.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“My early poetry was execrable. As with most bad poets, I was unaware of this fact, secure in my arrogance that the very act of creating gave some worth to the worthless abortions I was spawning. My mother remained tolerant even as I left reeking little piles of doggerel lying around the house. She was indulgent of her only child even if he was as blithely incontinent as an unhousebroken llama.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“It’s perfect.”
“It’s about loneliness,” I said.
“It is loneliness.”
“Do you think it’s ready?” I asked.
“It’s perfect…a masterpiece.”
“Do you think it’ll sell?” I asked.
“No fucking way.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“It isn’t hard being a hack writer. Between Dying Earth II and Dying Earth IX, six standard years had passed relatively painlessly. My research was meager, my plots formulaic, my characters cardboard, my prose preliterate, and my free time was my own. I traveled. I married twice more; each wife left me with no hard feelings but with a sizable portion of the royalties from my next Dying Earth. I explored religions and serious drinking, finding more hope of lasting solace in the latter.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“I found no muse on Hyperion during those first years. For many, the expansion of distance because of limited transportation—EMVs were unreliable, skimmers scarce—and the contraction of artificial consciousness due to absence of datasphere, no access to the All Thing, and only one fatline transmitter—all led to a renewal of creative energies, a new realization of what it meant to be human and an artist.
Or so I heard.
No muse appeared. My verse continued to be technically proficient and dead as Huck Finn’s cat.
I decided to kill myself.
But first I spent some time, nine years at least, carrying out a community service by providing the one thing new Hyperion lacked: decadence.
From a biosculptor aptly named Graumann Hacket, I obtained the hairy flanks, hooves, and goat legs of a satyr. I cultivated my beard and extended my ears. Graumann made interesting alterations to my sexual apparatus. Word got around. Peasant girls, indigenies, the wives of our true-blue city planners and pioneers—all awaited a visit from Hyperion’s only resident satyr or arranged one themselves. I learned what “priapic” and “satyriasis” really mean. Besides the unending series of sexual contests, I allowed my drinking bouts to become legendary and my vocabulary to return to something approaching the old poststroke days.
It was fucking wonderful. It was fucking hell.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“I haven’t forced my attentions on a ewe since my boyhood days on the farm,” I said. “I promised my mother in song that I wouldn’t indulge in sheep fucking again without asking her permission.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“All right,” I said. “You’ve got me. I confess. I’ve been murdering them and bathing in their blood. It works as a fucking literary aphrodisiac. I figure two…three hundred more victims; tops…and I’ll have my next Book ready for publication.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Start at the beginning,” I said. “Who was murdered?”
Johnny sat up straight, an attentive schoolboy. There was no doubting his sincerity. He said, “I was.”
It took ten minutes to get the story out of him. When he was finished, I no longer thought he was crazy. I was. Or I would be if I took the job.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“AI ‘families’ are primarily convenient code groups for showing where certain processing trends originated.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“There’s an old stereotype that says that Lusians are as subtle as a stomach pump and about half as pleasant. If I’d helped confirm the first part of that, Queue went a long way toward reinforcing the second prejudice.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Jesus Christ, people. Look at us. We’re not six fucking pilgrims, we’re a mob. Hoyt there with his cruciform carrying the ghost of Paul Duré. Our ‘semisentient’ erg in the box there. Colonel Kassad with his memory of Moneta. M. Brawne there, if we are to believe her tale, carrying not only an unborn child but a dead Romantic poet. Our scholar with the child his daughter used to be. Me with my muse. The Consul with whatever fucking baggage he’s brought to this insane trek. My God, people, we should have received a fucking group rate for this trip.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real.”
“How do you mean?”
Siri squinted away from me for a few seconds and absently brushed back a strand of hair. Her left hand stayed firmly around both of mine. “I’m not sure,” she said softly. “I think one begins to feel when things aren’t important. I’m not sure how to put it. When you’ve spent thirty years entering rooms filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you’ve had only half that number of years of experience. You know what the room and the people in it probably hold for you and you go looking for it. If it’s not there, you sense it earlier and leave to go about your business. You just know more about what is, what isn’t, and how little time there is to learn the difference. Do you understand, Merin? Do you follow me even a little bit?” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“The penalty for treason is death.” He giggled. “We’re all going to die within a few hours anyway. Why not make our last act an execution?” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“He joined with his peers in sneering at the New Bushido as a code for faggots, but an ancient vein of honor in the young Kassad’s soul secretly resonated to the thought of a samurai class whose life and work revolved around duty, self-respect, and the ultimate value of one’s word.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“He went on a nine-day drunk, awoke in one of the deeper hive tunnels of Lusus with his military comlog implant stolen—by someone who apparently had taken a correspondence course in surgery—his universal, card and farcaster access revoked, and his head exploring new frontiers of pain.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“He would end his life as useless and harmless as a child’s runaway balloon.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Kassad smiled for the first time. It was a thin smile, and very, very cold. “I will make no petition,” said Kassad. “I will ask nothing of them. When I meet them this time, I will kill them.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“The Consul awoke with the peculiar headache, dry throat, and sense of having forgotten a thousand dreams which only periods in cryogenic fugue could bring.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“There was something, thought the Consul, almost pleasantly demonic about Martin Silenus, with his ruddy cheeks, broad mouth, pitched eyebrows, sharp ears, and constantly moving hands sporting fingers long enough to serve a concert pianist. Or a strangler.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“The Ousters don’t want to occupy Hyperion,” he said. “If they take the planet they’ll loot what they want and then do what they do best. They’ll burn the cities into charred rubble, break the rubble into smaller pieces, and then bake the pieces until they glow. They’ll melt the poles, boil the oceans, and then use the residue to salt what’s left of the continents so nothing will ever grow there again.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“It occurs to me,” Sol Weintraub said as the group was finishing dessert, “that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Despite the decline of the Catholic Church into what amounted to a half-forgotten cult tolerated because of its quaintness and isolation from the mainstream of Hegemony life, Jesuit logic had not lost its bite.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Only my strange need for a destination and a certain masochistic determination to complete the terms of my self-imposed exile keep me moving upriver.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“For three hours we have been caught up in the middle of the end of the world.
The explosions started shortly after midnight, mere lightning crashes at first, and against our better judgment Tuk and I slid our heads through the tent flap to watch the pyrotechnics. I am used to the Matthewmonth monsoon storms on Pacem, so the first hour of lightning displays did not seem too unusual.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Tonight I visited Tuk’s rocky grave as the evening wind began to wail its aeolian dirge. I knelt there and tried to pray but nothing came.
Edouard, nothing came. I am as empty as those fake sarcophagi that you and I unearthed by the score from the sterile desert sands near Tarum bel Wadi.”
“The Zen Gnostics would say that this emptiness is a good sign; that it presages openness to a new level of awareness, new insights, new experiences.”
“Merde.
My emptiness is only…emptiness.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“I find myself hoping to catch a glimpse of a naked Bikura. This is not easy for a Jesuit of forty-eight standard years to admit. Still, it would not be an easy task even for a veteran voyeur. The nudity taboo seems absolute. They wear the long robes while awake and during their two-hour midday nap. They leave the village area to urinate and defecate, and I suspect that they do not remove the loose robes even then. They do not seem to bathe. One would suspect that this would cause olfactory problems, but there is no odor about these primitives except for the slight, sweet smell of chalma. “You must undress sometimes,” I said to Alpha one day, abandoning delicacy in favor of information. “No,” said Al and went elsewhere to sit and do nothing while fully dressed.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“problem: Where are the children?
solution: Keep pressing and poking until you find out. Perhaps the evening excursion down the cliff is related to all of this. There may be a nursery there. Or a pile of small bones.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Each day I do a medscan of myself. The nematodes remain—perhaps thicker, perhaps not. I am convinced that they are purely parasitic although my body has shown no signs of this. I peer at my face in the pool near the waterfall and see only the same long, aging countenance that I have learned to dislike in recent years. This morning, while gazing at my image in the water, I opened my mouth wide, half thinking that I would see gray filaments and nematode clusters growing from the roof of my mouth and the back of my throat. There was nothing.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“I stared as Alpha’s corpse first twitched and then visibly vibrated, almost levitating off the altar in the spastic violence of sudden decomposition. For a few seconds the cruciform seemed to increase in size and deepen in color, glowing as red as raw meat, and I imagined then that I caught a glimpse of the network of filaments and nematodes holding the disintegrating body together like metal fibers in a sculptor’s melting model. The flesh flowed.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“Weeks of studying the damn parasite and still no clue as to how it functions. Worse, I no longer care. What I care about now is more important.
Why has God allowed this obscenity?
Why have the Bikura been punished this way?
Why was I chosen to suffer their fate?
I ask these questions in nightly prayers but I hear no answers, only the blood song of the wind from the Cleft.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“If the Church is meant to die, it must do so—but do so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its rebirth in Christ. It must go into the darkness not willingly but well—bravely and firm of faith—like the millions who have gone before us, keeping faith with all those generations facing death in the isolated silence of death camps and nuclear fireballs and cancer wards and pogroms, going into the darkness, if not hopefully, then prayerfully that there is some reason for it all, something worth the price of all that pain, all those sacrifices. All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or the all too shakable conviction of faith.” - Hyperion - Dan Simmons
“He almost said, “There’s room here,” which in fact there wasn’t, but he’d seen her looking around at everything that hadn’t changed, the authentic English Pub Dartboard up on the wagon wheel and the whorehouse swag lamp with the purple psychedelic bulb with the vibrating filament, the collection of model hot rods made entirely of Coors cans, the beach volleyball autographed by Wilt Chamberlain in Day-Glo felt marker, the velvet painting and so forth, with an expression of, you would have to say, distaste.” - Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon
“It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn’t been smoking much and it wasn’t headlights—but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety.” - Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon
“Sometimes in the shadows the view would light up, usually when he was smoking weed, as if the contrast knob of Creation had been messed with just enough to give everything an under-glow, a luminous edge, and promise that the night was about to turn epic somehow.” - Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon
“Wait a minute, I ditched social-studies class a lot, but... Jews and the AB...Isn’t there...something about, I forget... hatred?”
“The book on Mickey is, is he’s unpredictable. More and more lately. Some would say eccentric. I would say stoned out of his fuckin mind, nothing personal.” - Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon
“Bigfoot often reminded viewers of legendary used-car figure Cal Worthington—except where Cal was famous for including live animals in his pitch, Bigfoot’s scripts featured a relentless terror squad of small children, who climbed all over the model-home furniture, performed insubordinate cannonballs into the backyard pools, whooped and hollered and pretended to shoot Bigfoot down, screaming “Freak Power!” and “Death to the Pig!” Viewers were ecstatic.” - Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon
“An old Gordita reflex, dating back to shortly after the Second World War, when a black family had actually tried to move into town and the citizens, with helpful advice from the Ku Klux Klan, had burned the place to the ground and then, as if some ancient curse had come into effect, refused to allow another house ever to be built on the site.” - Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon
“Could it be Sister Carlotta who had doubted Bean’s humanity?
Sister Carlotta, who wept when he left her and went into space? Sister Carlotta, who loved him as a mother loves her child? How could she doubt him?
If they wanted to find some inhuman human, some alien in a human suit, they ought to take a good long look at a nun who embraces a child as her own, and then goes around casting doubt about whether he’s a real boy. The opposite of Pinocchio’s fairy. She touches a real boy and turns him into something awful and fearful.” - Ender’s Shadow - Orson Scott Card
“You seem to be counting on your understanding of his psychology.”
“Sister Carlotta assures me that he differs from ordinary human DNA in only one small area.”
“So now he’s human again?”
“I’ve got to make decisions based on something, Dimak!”
“So the jury’s still out on the human thing?” - Ender’s Shadow - Orson Scott Card
“Bean, you’re not as smart about everything as you think you are!”
“Yes I am, sir,” said Bean. “Or you wouldn’t have given this assignment to me. May I be dismissed? Or do you want me to tell you the roster now?” - Ender’s Shadow - Orson Scott Card
“Yes, I’m paranoid and xenophobic. That’s how I got this job. Cultivate those virtues and you, too, might rise to my lofty station.” - Ender’s Shadow - Orson Scott Card
“What do I feel?
What’s wrong with me that I have to think about it to know?” - Ender’s Shadow - Orson Scott Card
“The strategy was simple and obvious. Since Bonzo Madrid had kindly pinned his army against a wall, ready to be slaughtered, it only remained to find the right way to enter the battleroom and carry out the massacre.” - Ender’s Shadow - Orson Scott Card
“If the universe had any kindness in it, or even simple justice, Ender would never have to take another life. He had surely filled his quota.” - Ender’s Shadow - Orson Scott Card
“Her knowledge was a banquet, and if he remained quiet enough, he would be able to stay and feast.” - Ender’s Shadow - Orson Scott Card
“I can’t reach you with a ruler. Sarcasm is my last resort.” - Ender’s Shadow - Orson Scott Card
“At other times, even quite unusual happenings cannot avail to lift a man from dulness and poverty of mind; one can sit in the middle of a ballroom and be cool, indifferent, unaffected by anything.” - Pan - Knut Hamsun trans. W. W. Worster
“Here, I thought to myself, is a little endless song trickling away all to itself, and no one ever hears it, and no one ever thinks of it, and still it trickles on nevertheless, to itself, all the time, all the time! And I felt that the mountains were no longer quite deserted, as long as I could hear that little trickling song.” - Pan - Knut Hamsun trans. W. W. Worster
“For a full quarter of an hour I did not exist for her. Then I did something I repent of, and have not yet forgotten. Her shoe fell off: I snatched it up and flung it far out into the water, for pure joy that she was near, or from some impulse to make myself remarked, to remind her of my existence—I do not know. It all happened so suddenly I did not think, only felt that impulse.” - Pan - Knut Hamsun trans. W. W. Worster
“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “Everything, perhaps. I wish all these people would go away at once, all of them. No, not you—remember, you must stay till the last.” - Pan - Knut Hamsun trans. W. W. Worster
“I had thought it all over during the night, and taken my resolve. Why should I let myself be dazzled any longer by this creature of moods, a fisher-girl, a thing of no culture? Had not her name fastened for long enough on my heart, sucking it dry? Enough of that!—though it struck me that, perhaps, I had come nearer to her by treating her with indifference and scorn.” - Pan - Knut Hamsun trans. W. W. Worster
“There’s no saying what mad thing you will do next,” she went on. “And it is intolerable to be constantly looking after you.” - Pan - Knut Hamsun trans. W. W. Worster
“How dare you sit there speaking ill of her? She never did an unkind thing; it was only right that she should laugh at me. Be quiet, devil take you, and leave me in peace—do you hear?” - Pan - Knut Hamsun trans. W. W. Worster
“I forgot, by the way, that he could not by any means be called a perfect man,” - Pan - Knut Hamsun trans. W. W. Worster
“Were I one of these writer-fellows, I should probably say that her features were Grecian, but being neither a writer nor a poet I can do her greater justice by saying that she combined all of the finest lines that one sees in the typical American girl's face rather than the pronounced sheeplike physiognomy of the Greek goddess. No, even the dirt couldn't hide that fact; she was beautiful beyond compare.” - The People That Time Forgot - Edgar Rice Burroughs
“She wasn't asking much for it, much less after the gallery's cut; in the end it would probably work out to a dollar an hour, but if you calculated things that way, why bother? You did it to do it. Everything else was extraneous.” - Skin - Kathe Koja
"'I don't belong anywhere,' and wondering as she said it why she had, it sounded so sophomoric, so moronically proud. 'I just, I don't really show much.'" - Skin - Kathe Koja
“She knew people, artists, who liked to gurgle about their 'babies,' their 'children': 'Every one of my pieces is a child of mine,' who had said that to her? Horseshit. Children were children and work was work and people were assholes when they started believing their own arty bullshit. They should all work with metal, get burned once in a while: keep them grounded.” - Skin - Kathe Koja
“'I don't know,' flat and honest, out before she could think or rethink to call it back. 'I guess I'll know it when I see it. If I see it.'
'You won't. Unless you build it yourself.' - Skin - Kathe Koja
“More mythic than even in her Surgeons days, skinny body in black and red, always a new bandage, a new bruise or laceration: and always the same impatient brutality, as if to find her answers she must tan living flesh, break bones to heal them in humps deliberately grotesque and dire; nothing was safe from her, most especially herself.” - Skin - Kathe Koja
“He was a misanthrope, and to italicize his misanthropy he had made himself a juggler. To live, also; for the stomach has to be consulted.” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“The pathway of this creek, full of knots and angles, almost perpendicular, and better adapted for goats than men, terminated on the platform where the plank was placed.” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“There were eight of them, and there were seemingly among them one or two women, hard to recognize under the rags and tatters in which the group was attired — clothes which were no longer man’s or woman’s. Rags have no sex.” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“Those men, the only ones he knew, were unknown to him.
"He could not have said who they were. His childhood had been passed among them, without his having the consciousness of being of them. He was in juxtaposition to them, nothing more.
"He had just been — forgotten — by them.” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“He hastened without an object — a fugitive before Fate.” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“It was that moment of preliminary anxiety when it seems as though the elements are changing into persons, and one is about to witness the mysterious transfiguration of the wind into the wind-god.” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“An idea is a guide; he had no idea. They had brought him there and left him there. They and there — these two enigmas represented his doom. They were humankind. There was the universe. For him in all creation there was absolutely no other basis to rest on but the little piece of ground where he placed his heel, ground hard and cold to his naked feet. In the great twilight world, open on all sides, what was there for the child? Nothing.” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“To exist no more, yet to persist; to be in the abyss, yet out of it; to reappear above death as if indissoluble — there is a certain amount of impossibility mixed with such reality.” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“In the vastness of dispersion he was wearing silently away. He had had blood which had been drunk, skin which had been eaten, flesh which had been stolen. Nothing had passed him by without taking somewhat from him. December had borrowed cold of him; midnight, horror; the iron, rust; the plague, miasma; the flowers, perfume. His slow disintegration was a toll paid to all — a toll of the corpse to the storm, to the rain, to the dew, to the reptiles, to the birds. All the dark hands of night had rifled the dead.” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“Destiny is made up of cross-roads. An option of path is dangerous. This little being had an early choice of doubtful chances.” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“He had what might be called a wan countenance; for the countenance is above all things a reflection, and it is an error to believe that idea is colourless. That countenance was evidently the surface of a strange inner state, the result of a composition of contradictions, some tending to drift away in good, others in evil, and to an observer it was the revelation of one who was less and more than human — capable of falling below the scale of the tiger, or of rising above that of man. Such chaotic souls exist.” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“The sea is ever for and against. It knots that it may unravel itself; one of its slopes attacks, the other relieves. No apparition is so wonderful as the waves. Who can paint the alternating hollows and promontories, the valleys, the melting bosoms, the sketches? How render the thickets of foam, blendings of mountains and dreams? The indescribable is everywhere there — in the rending, in the frowning, in the anxiety, in the perpetual contradiction, in the chiaroscuro, in the pendants of the cloud, in the keys of the ever-open vault, in the disaggregation without rupture, in the funereal tumult caused by all that madness!” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“Other voices express the soul of the universe; this one expresses the monster. It is the howl of the formless. It is the inarticulate finding utterance in the indefinite. A thing it is full of pathos and terror.” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“What was to become of him? Here was the country again. To the east great inclined planes of snow marked out the wide slopes of Radipole. Should he continue this journey? Should he advance and reenter the solitudes? Should he return and reenter the streets? What was he to do between those two silences — the mute plain and the deaf city? Which of the two refusals should he choose?” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“Not so quick, you horrid glutton! Isn’t he a greedy scoundrel? When such scum are hungry, they eat in a revolting fashion. You should see a lord sup. In my time I have seen dukes eat. They don’t eat; that’s noble. They drink, however. Come, you pig, stuff yourself!” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“The beginning of day is sinister.” - The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo
“We can never wake up in the same place we went to sleep in. Our place in the universe, the universe itself, it all changes faster and faster by the second. Every one of us standing on this planet, we’re all moving forwards and we’re never ever coming back.” - The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall
“My life was perfect and pointless, and if that didn’t mean anything good, it didn’t mean anything bad either.” - The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall
“When I get to the middle of something I find I’ve lost my grip on one of the ends.” - The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall
“Geniuses don’t go mad,” he said. “That’s what people don’t understand. They get out so far out that the water is like glass and they can see for miles and see so much, and in ways people have never seen before. They go out over such depths, down down down and down, and some of them get taken. Something rushes up out of their thoughts, from the insides of their own heads and through the act of looking and the thinking itself – because the deep blue is in there too, do you understand? And it takes them.” - The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall
“He claimed he didn’t have the time for death and would instead ‘unshackle himself from the multitudinous failings of the corporeal harness and progress forward ad infinitum’.” - The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall
“You’re both determined to find a crisis, aren’t you? Is it so completely inconceivable that I might know exactly what I’m doing and what is happening while we’re out here?” - The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall
“Literature redeems daily life, endowing it with meaning; recasting it, teleologically, as a prolegomenon to the work.” - The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure - C. D. Rose
“In the very rare occasions that a writer manages to make a half-decent sum, the press go apoplectic, as if anybody could do such a thing.” - The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure - C. D. Rose
“Asle thinks, and he thinks that thought again and again, it’s the only thought he can think” - The Other Name - Jon Fosse trans. Damion Searls
“I think no, now I need to stop, now I’m thinking foolishly myself, thinking about other people’s folly while my own thoughts don’t make sense, they’re never clear enough, they don’t fit together” - The Other Name - Jon Fosse trans. Damion Searls
“I can’t just keep sitting and frittering away my time thinking confused thoughts like this, I think,” - The Other Name - Jon Fosse trans. Damion Searls
"For an extremely paranoid instant I thought of the possibility that this situation may not have anything to do with new types of ARGs and that I might be just be some poor shmo tricked into smuggling a briefcase full of cocaine out of a train station." - Project Neurocam: An Investigation - Robin Hely
“Why would I rather muck about playing clumsy spy games in the street than go and make decent money doing something I was actually good at?“ - Project Neurocam: An Investigation - Robin Hely
"Even on the dullest days at work I had something else to contemplate that made my life seem more interesting. I felt like telling the constant string of unfortunate victims to whom I was attempting to sell vacuum cleaners that I had something else more important going on in my life; I was not merely a lowly call centre salesperson. I was a Neurocam Operative and I had secret business to attend to." - Project Neurocam: An Investigation - Robin Hely
“Except, most little kids, when backed into a corner covering their faces, probably wouldn’t keep silently mouthing a litany of fucks.” - Spermjackers From Hell - Christine Morgan
“If he ever got the chance, which he won’t, on account of she’s stuck his ass so far in the friendzone he needs a goddamn passport.” - Spermjackers From Hell - Christine Morgan
“All that, and you didn’t even get a blowjob.” Spencer tutted. “Sucks for you. Or, should I say, no sucks for you.” - Spermjackers From Hell - Christine Morgan
“What’s your lease say about devil-worship?” asked Beth. “What about pets? Does a demon love-slave count as a pet? Your landlady would have a fit.” - Spermjackers From Hell - Christine Morgan
“Jake held up a hand. “Needs to be freshly laid.” “Don’t we all,” Marty muttered.” - Spermjackers From Hell - Christine Morgan
“I will punch you square in the throat,” she said, without even looking his way. “I didn’t say anything.” “I will punch you square in the nuts, too.” - Spermjackers From Hell - Christine Morgan
“Yeah, and animators really did put subliminal sex messages into Disney cartoons.” - Spermjackers From Hell - Christine Morgan
“Fuckin’ Tater! The alky-wino-boozer D.A.R.E. bum.” - Spermjackers From Hell - Christine Morgan
“Jake was also concerned about what it might show of him. Beth wouldn’t have zoomed in for a close-up, but he’d made it this far in his life without having his dick on the internet, and he’d really prefer to keep it that way.” - Spermjackers From Hell - Christine Morgan
“Golly-gee-whillikers what a surprise it was when she turned up preggers. Oops. Awkward. Embarrassing. ” - Spermjackers From Hell - Christine Morgan
“Toward the seductive promise of her, with his dick straining at his pants as if pointing the way, his own personal dowsing rod.” - Spermjackers From Hell - Christine Morgan
“Free epic blow-your-mind blowjobs; succubus suckfest, half of fuckin’ Fairmont should be thankin’ us!” - Spermjackers From Hell - Christine Morgan
“Which means this is the perfect place for another of these obnoxious goddamn Interludes!” - Spermjackers From Hell - Christine Morgan
“We’ve just turned every woman in town into a game of uterine pachinko, and you tell me ‘oops’?” - Spermjackers From Hell - Christine Morgan
"George R. R. Martin's seventh book in his phenomenally popular "A Song of Ice and Fire" series has already generated thousands of reviews. He hasn't yet finished the sixth." - NPR article
"Idea for a new app: an undo button that could undo long amounts of time. Three months. A year. A life." - BoJack Horseman s2e12
"If you'd like to never see him again, I have ways of getting rid of him." "What kind of ways?" "Asking him politely to not come back. Actually, that's the only way." - BoJack Horseman s4e6 - Judah, everyone loves you <3
“So I thought and I thought, and then I thought some more. And finally I came to a decision.
"I decided I didn't know what the heck to do.” - Pop. 1280 - Jim Thompson
“It was at this place where you throw balls at a colored fella's head, and if you hit him you won a prize. I was just doin' it because the fella that ran the place kept asking me to. It had seemed unobliging not to, but I sure didn't want to hit this colored man and I didn't.” - Pop. 1280 - Jim Thompson
“I figure sometimes that maybe that's why we don't make as much progress as other parts of the nation. People lose so much time from their jobs in lynching other people, and they spend so much money on rope and kerosene and getting likkered-up in advance and other essentials, that there ain't an awful lot of money or man-hours left for practical purposes.” - Pop. 1280 - Jim Thompson
“I reckon my head's plumb bustin' from all these things you been tellin' me, Robbie Lee. Maybe I better run along before you give me some more information, an' it pops wide open.” - Pop. 1280 - Jim Thompson
“And I sighed and thought Oh, Lord, how long, god dang it? One cross is bad enough, but I hadn't ought to carry a whole goddang lumberyard around with me!” - Pop. 1280 - Jim Thompson
“I thought, well, that was at least one nail out of my cross, and maybe, if I kept on being upright and God-fearin' and never hurting no one unless it was for their good or mine, which was pretty much the same thing, why then maybe all my other problems would get straightened out as easy as this one had.” - Pop. 1280 - Jim Thompson
“Them railroad workers throwin' chunks of coal at you an' splashin' you with water, and you fellas without nothin' to defend yourself with except shotguns an' automatic rifles! Yes, sir, goddang it, I really got to hand it to you!” - Pop. 1280 - Jim Thompson
"All children left behind." Boom. Equity!" - source
"Rubber boots, plastic gloves, digging tools, and tote bags are not typical beach supplies...unless you're going to bottle beach in dead horse bay in Brooklyn, New York." - Tenements, Towers & Trash - Julia Wertz
“Where you from?” “Any place the train takes me.” - Eva's Man - Gayl Jones
“Alive, you got to be just you. Dead, they needed to encapsulate you, harness you into a favorite movie they could buy, a favorite motto they could tattoo. No one got that you were those things primarily because you were you, not because they made you.” - This Thing Between Us - Gus Moreno
“But anyway, the stone is there now. It’s sitting there, and someone can sit on it. I have to sit down on that stone there. And why don’t I. Why am I just staying here. I can move as much as I want, right. I can go wherever I want, right. Nobody can tell me not to. No one, no. And so why am I just standing. Why don’t I do anything then.” - A Shining - Jon Fosse trans. Damion Searls
“More human interaction was the last thing I wanted. And I preferred the emptiness of our condo to seeing anyone else. Plus, we both know I wasn’t alone there.” - This Thing Between Us - Gus Moreno
"No matter how many starts I get, there's always the same ending. Everything falls apart and I end up alone." - BoJack Horseman s6e11
"Great! I've made my romantic offer. I've officially been a good boyfriend. I will now retreat to our living room to play video games all day." - BoJack Horseman s6e10
"I think the point of antidepressants is to be antidepressed." - BoJack Horseman s6e7
"My parents didn't name me until I was four, and I turned out great, right?" "...Bye." - BoJack Horseman s6e2
"My dad totally overreacted when he found me not breathing." - BoJack Horseman s6e1
"Erica! What are you doing here with that child-size coffin?" - BoJack Horseman s5e2
"This is not about my dick." "Well, maybe it should be about your dick." "What?" - BoJack Horseman s5e1
"I was gonna see if he wants to make instruments out of shoe boxes and rubber bands." "And, uh, that will satisfy you? When your life ends and you're looking back at this day, you'll think that was a good day?" "Yeah?" - BoJack Horseman s5e1
"Where's my random detail that suddenly makes everything make sense?" - BoJack Horseman s4e12
"I don't think anyone should be held accountable for what they did last night. Whether it was murdering people, or speaking out of turn." - Psych, s6e2
"And Henry Spencer, where are your pants?!" "I'm . . . not entirely sure." - Psych, s6e2
"I apologize for my dad's life." - Psych, s6e2
"I forgot. And Gus refused, simply because he has no respect for human life." - Psych, s6e2
"Okay, okay, I hear you. I need to find a balance between writing fart jokes and grinding the nuts." - Impossible People - Julia Wertz
"Our job is to report the news, not fabricate it. That's the government's job." - V for Vendetta (2005)
"I don't want to sound crude. But I want to say, 'Thank you.' Peeking at your knockers totally made my day. Two days later, I'm still thinking about it. Boobs. Boobs. At the bank." - Corinne Mucha in I Saw You (ed. Julia Wertz)
"Don't come in! Father-daughter bathroom time." - BoJack Horseman s4e4 (why yes, I am rewatching the show this week, what gave it away...)
"If this sounds like gobbledygook to you, in hindsight, it is." - Fear of a Black Universe - Stephon Alexander
"'Hey bros. Just wanted to pop on here and give a little update regarding my hormonal health. I’m happy to report to all who have asked that my morning wood has been more consistent and harder than it ever has. This is due to my internal work/coming to terms with my hormonal state, and TRT.' Could you imagine?" - u/intellectualbedlamp
“Man up or suck it up, Danger. Commit to something or stop your maudlin pity party. You can make your choice or you can have it taken away from you again.” - Three Years with the Rat - Jay Hosking
"You come by it honestly, the ugliness inside you. You were born broken, that's your birthright. And now you can fill your life with projects: your books and your movies and your little girlfriends, but it won't make you whole. You're BoJack Horseman. There's no cure for that." - BoJack Horseman s2e1
"I want to be the person that they think I am, but I'm not. They see a greatness in me and they mistake it for goodness, but I know there's nothing there." - BoJack Horseman s1e12
"It's never too late to be the person you want to be. You need to choose the life you want. That'll be fiiiiiive cents please." - BoJack Horseman s1e11 - love the scene, mostly because Charlie Brown references.
"Don't look at me. I'm well adjusted. You all want my life." - BoJack Horseman s1e10
"Closure is a made up thing by Steven Spielberg to sell movie tickets. It, like true love and the Munich Olympics, doesn't exist in the real world. The only thing to do now is just to keep moving forward." - BoJack Horseman s1e5
“My only accomplishment for that year was discovering our dad’s Playboy collection, stashed in a box under the couch where my father now slept most nights. For my birthday that year, Grace bought me a 1950s edition of Catcher in the Rye and lovingly threw out my sweatpants.” - Three Years with the Rat - Jay Hosking
“I’ve got good reasons to live,” he said. “Who else is going to take care of the rats?” - Three Years with the Rat - Jay Hosking
"Hmm...fake my death to avoid getting texts from a man. Fuck it. Ghost protocol me." - Inside Job, s1e7
"What's the point of anonymous sex if you add each other on Facebook afterwards?" - Inside Job, s1e7
“Eve wore an oversized, slightly asymmetrical T-shirt over expensive leggings, a luxury athletic brand Sandra herself had coveted. Eve looked like she might have even worked out in them.” - The Invisible World - Nora Fussner
“She wasn’t sure why this, too, bothered her, why she hadn’t introduced herself to Ryan yet, why it was only Monday and she was already out of steam. Have you tried turning it off and on again? she thought sardonically.” - The Invisible World - Nora Fussner
"She knew he lacked that quality of wonder, that hope that the world was enormous and strange and harbored secrets it shared with a precious few.” - The Invisible World - Nora Fussner
“I imagine that it wanted to let us know it was there, as a courtesy. As weird as that sounds.” - The Invisible World - Nora Fussner
“This confident woman couldn’t really believe she had been pursued by a ghost since her childhood, could she? Stiff, awkward people who needed an excuse for not fitting in to the world, Sandra understood. Give them a ghost, a companion for the long lonely nights. Something to explain feeling uncomfortable in their skins.” - The Invisible World - Nora Fussner
“Alan Purvis, founder of the Paranormal Investigators of Pennsylvania, and possessed by the guiltiest conscience east of the Mississippi, elbowed into their midst bearing two pallets of chocolate, glazed, and Boston cream for the crew.” - The Invisible World - Nora Fussner
“A haunted house wouldn’t be haunted without the living there to notice, even if it seems to drive the living away.” - The Invisible World - Nora Fussner
"Asking questions that are answered on the syllabus summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. Questions answered on the syllabus go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide." - the syllabus
“Please do not suggest that I should have “liberated” the roosters in the woods somewhere. People dump animals all the time in rural areas. They die. They starve or get eaten by predators. It’s much kinder and more honest to kill them. At least as a human you can do it quickly.
And if they don’t die, if they manage to establish themselves, congratulations. You’ve just introduced an invasive exotic to take over the niche of a native species, probably another ground-dwelling bird that’s holding on by its claws.” - The Vegetarian Myth - Lierre Keith
“Because if death was natural—a part of life, not an insult to life—then why was I a vegan?” - The Vegetarian Myth - Lierre Keith
“I wanted to believe that my life—my physical existence—was possible without killing, without death. It’s not. No life is. But since fairy tales are filled with apples, let’s continue to follow their crumbs through the fruit-filled forest.” - The Vegetarian Myth - Lierre Keith
“Thou shalt not kill”—or the Buddhist version “Abstain from killing”— is a fine moral guideline for human society. It is nonsensical when applied to the natural world.” - The Vegetarian Myth - Lierre Keith
"While I was extremely happy, I was simultaneously horrified that my twenties had an ISBN number." - Drinking at the Movies - Julia Wertz
“The pilgrim restlessly seeks what they do not know. Again, there can be something of the quest in the reader finding their way among books. There is an urgency in the search and a sense—a conviction, perhaps—that around the corner, in the next nook, will be the book that will arise to meet this moment.” - In Praise of Good Bookstores - Jeff Deutsch
“Some bookstores have created phone-free zones, acknowledging that we spend much of our day browsing ephemera in search of nothing worthwhile, consumed by the pull of the vacuous, and that the bookstore might represent an opportunity to focus on something more meaningful.” - In Praise of Good Bookstores - Jeff Deutsch
“No one can be sure of anything. Let them eat me, I’ll give them horrible indigestion.” - Tender is the Flesh - Agustina Bazterrica
“He thinks it’ll be cause for concern when the man stops looking at him this way, when the hatred doesn’t keep him going any longer. Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything. He wishes he could hate someone for the death of his son. But who can he blame for a sudden death? He tried to hate God but he doesn’t believe in God. He tried to hate all of humanity for being so fragile and ephemeral but he couldn’t keep it up because hating everyone is the same as hating no one. He also wishes he could break like Ency, but his collapse never comes.” - Tender is the Flesh - Agustina Bazterrica
"People will risk everything for a bit of something beautiful." (My Dark Vanessa, by Kate Elizabeth Russell. pg84) - Ain't that the truth.
"Can we forget about the flags and focus on the mutiny?" (Our Flag Means Death)
"Whip my balls!" (Our Flag Means Death)
"We are wanted nowhere and turn up everywhere." (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, by George Martin. pg286)
"She found it boring and did not finish it." (Despair, by Valdmir Nabokov. pg80) - The narrator works for that story and that story alone.
"What did you do today, girl?" "Wheedled a crazy man with come all over me." "I wish I had time for a social life." (The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris. pg27)
"What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?" "I'll accept that. Guilty as charged." (Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut. pg153)
"Just don’t touch my dead fly collection. Or my alive fly collection. Or my stamps." (Dead End: Paranormal Park - ep2: The Tunnel)
"It's just a melon baller. Nice and quick." (Dead End: Paranormal Park - ep4: Night of the Living Kids
So put your best face on, everybody / Pretend you know this song everybody / Come hang / Let's go out with a bang. (Bang! - AJR)
And you're magical, something spectacular / Baby, for you need a whole new vernacular. (Pretending - Anthony Amorim)
She's kissing the devil / she's killing her friends. (She Doesn't Sleep - Anthony Amorim)
"Crystals speak to me." "What do they say?" "Buy more crystals." (No Reason - Beetlejuice (2018))
I may be suicidal / But Beetlejuice, it's not as if I've lost my mind! (Say My Name - Beetlejuice (2018))
Sure the groom crawled out of a tomb / But hey, hey, it's a wedding! (Creepy Old Guy - Beetlejuice (2018))
Have you guys seen Lolita? / This is just like that / But fine (Creepy Old Guy - Beetlejuice (2018))
I found me a wife / L'chaim to life / This is so normal! / I was ignored / But now I'm adored / Because I extorted, tortured, and lied / Give it up for my underage bride (Creepy Old Guy - Beetlejuice (2018))
He ran into my knife / He ran into my knife ten times (Cell Block Tango - Chicago)
I feel scared and I'm starting to sink / and I only sink deeper the deeper I think. (Lost at Stea - fin)
I can’t take this place / No I can’t take this place / I just wanna go where I can get some space (Gooey - Glass Animals)
Are we gonna have a problem? / You gotta bone to pick? / You've come so far, why now are you pulling on my dick? (Candy Store - Heathers (2014))
"Does your mommy know you eat all that crap?" "Not anymore!" (Freeze Your Brain - Heathers (2014))
Let's go, you know the drill / I'm hot and pissed and on the pill. (Dead Girl Walking - Heathers (2014))
I'm starvin', darlin' / Let me put my lips to somethin' / Let me wrap my teeth around the world (Eat Your Young - Hozier) - the tune of each verse is delicious.
You can't buy this fineness / Let me see the heat get to you / Let me watch the dressing start to peel (Eat Your Young - Hozier)
I wanna run against the world that's turnin' / I'd movе so fast that I'd outpace the dawn / I wanna be gonе (De Selby pt2 - Hozier)
We tried the world, good God / It wasn't for us (Jackie and Wilson - Hozier)
I want the fire in their eyes / I want applause that never dies (Good Things Come to Those Who Wait - Isak Danielson)
Waiting for the days to leave / So dreams can take care of me (Is it Alright For You - Isak Danielson)
Acting like somebody else / Is this really happening? Who can tell? (Is it Alright For You - Isak Danielson)
Am I dying in reality? / Who can tell? (Is it Alright For You - Isak Danielson)
Maybe I am meant to bleed (Is it Alright For You - Isak Danielson)
I tried to see the best of you / But you're eating me alive (The Best of You - Isak Danielson)
I lost my place, but I can't stop this story / I'll find my way, but until then I'm only spinning (Spinning - Jack's Mannequin)
I can't wake up from this dream / This madness my reality (Are You Serious? - K. Flay
I need noise / I need the buzz of a sub / need the crack of a whip / need some blood in the cut. (Blood in the Cut - K. Flay)
Think I found the punisher, punisher, looks like me / She's got the body of Jesus, but the mark of the beast / I found the finisher, finisher, chokehold queen / Nobody knows how to punish me like me (Punisher - K. Flay)
I guess you have to do a lot of things that you don't wanna do / And by you, I mean me, and by me, I mean you (Spaghetti - K. Flay)
Life gives me confetti and I smoke it like it's pot (Spaghetti - K. Flay)
Whatever you think of me / leave it alone / I don't wanna live in the shade of her throne (Voice - Kira)
I said I don't know what to do anymore / As if I knew what to do before / I can fuck up almost anything (Banks - Lincoln)
If I meant every word that I ever said / You would probably question the life I have led / You'd probably think I'm an evil, broken person / And you would be right (Downhill - Lincoln)
I went downhill at such steep incline / That my rearview mirror showed me only the sky (Downhill - Lincoln)
Well, if there's one thing that I'm sure of / It's that I think too much about shit that doesn't matter / And I don't think enough about things that make a difference / But would that even make a difference? / Doing anything at all would be overkill (How I Survived Bobby Mackey's Personal Hell - Lincoln)
I've got just a few exceptional skills / That I doubt anyone could hold a candle to / For instance: I can go three months or more / Without ever being sure of anything (How I Survived Bobby Mackey's Personal Hell - Lincoln)
I can transcend my existence with thoughts and words / And when I say transcend, I mean demean (How I Survived Bobby Mackey's Personal Hell - Lincoln)
Some people want to be your friend / Some people just want to be free / And the worst thing about me is that I'm somewhere in between (Smokey Eyes - Lincoln)
This is not what all my idols told me college would be like / I hope someday you learn to take your own advice (Smokey Eyes - Lincoln)
I am killing time with a razor blade / It is begging for its life (How I Survived Bobby Mackey's Personal Hell - Lincoln)
I took a little journey to the unknown / And I come back changed / And I can feel it in my bones - Lord Huron
"Kill me romantically / Fill my soul with vomit then ask me for a piece of gum" (Love Me Dead - Ludo)
I don't patronize, I realize / I'm losing and this is my real life / I'm half asleep and I am wide awake / This habit is always to hard to break. (All to Myself - Marianas Trench)
Goodbye, mother's fairytale / Never after will suffice / When star crossed lovers take their life (Astoria - Marianas Trench)
This diminuendo / only gets obscene / I just want a crescendo (Burning Up - Marianas Trench)
My bag is ripped and worn / then again now so am I. (Cross My Heart - Marianas Trench)
I'm just a drink away from honesty / so who knows what's true? / But I'm wondering if you don't miss me too. (Don't Miss Me - Marianas Trench)
I'm so afraid of trying something new / Cause every start begins with saying goodbye to you (End of an Era - Marianas Trench)
Come face the music Astoria / It's about fucking time now Astoria (End of an Era - Marianas Trench)
This never was the man I hoped to be by now / We went through hell in Astoria / We lost ourselves in Astoria (End of an Era - Marianas Trench)
I could be your perfect disaster / You could be my ever after (Ever After - Marianas Trench)
I'll wreck this if I have to / tell me what good would that do? (Masterpiece Theatre II - Marianas Trench)
So don't stop / no stopping yet / What if the one true love's / the only one that you get (One Love - Marianas Trench)
You can say that I don't know romance / I can sing but I can't dance (Shut Up and Kiss Me - Marianas Trench)
I just wish you'd open fire on me / So I can see you still worry if I care (This Means War - Marianas Trench)
Don't know where you went / No object permanence / I see I looked up what it meant (Yesterday - Marianas Trench)
I'm just so good at fucking up / But I'm fixing to change my luck / Turns out enough's enough (Yesterday - Marianas Trench)
I'm in the business of losing your interest / And I turn a profit each time that we speak (Come Over - Noah Kahan)
Someday I'm gonna be / Somebody people want (Come Over - Noah Kahan)
But I ignore things / And I move sideways / 'Till I forget what I felt in the first place / At the end of the day / I know there are worse ways to stay alive (Growing Sideways - Noah Kahan)
Oh, if my engine works perfect on empty / I guess I'll drive (Growing Sideways - Noah Kahan)
Why is pain so damn impatient? Ain't like it's got a place to be (Growing Sideways - Noah Kahan)
If all my time was wasted / I don't mind, I'll watch it go / It's better to die numb than feel it all (Growing Sideways - Noah Kahan)
I worry for you / You worry for me / And it's fine if we know we won't change / Collect every dream in these old empty pockets / In hope that I'll need them someday (Halloween - Noah Kahan)
I'm losin' myself in the tiniest objects / I'm seein' my life on a screen (Halloween - Noah Kahan)
But I only tell the truth / when I'm sure that I'm lyin' (Halloween - Noah Kahan)
The weather ain't been bad / If you're into masochistic bullshit (Homesick - Noah Kahan)
Time moves so damn slow I swear / I feel my organs failing / I stopped caring 'bout a month ago / Since then it's been smooth sailing (Homesick - Noah Kahan)
Spend the rest of my life with what could have been / and I'll die in the house that I grew up in (Homesick - Noah Kahan)
I saw the end / it looks just like the middle (No Complaints - Noah Kahan)
If I get too close / And I'm not how you hoped / Forgive my northern attitude / Oh, I was raised out in the cold (Northern Attitude - Noah Kahan)
Does it bite at your edges? / Do you lie awake restless? / Why am I so obsessive? (She Calls Me Back - Noah Kahan)
And I'll dream each night of some version of you / That I might not have but I did not lose (Stick Season - Noah Kahan)
A minute from home / yet I feel so far from it (...) / it's all washing over me / I'm angry again (The View Between Villages - Noah Kahan)
Well, you may be king for the moment / But I am a queen, understand? / And I've got your pawns and your bishops / And castles all inside the palm of my hand (Control - Poe)
While you were busy destroying my life / What was half in me has become whole (Control - Poe)
I gave you the benefit of the doubt, it's true / But keep in mind, my darling, not every saint is a fool (Control - Poe)
If I decided to make you my religion / I think God'd be kind (Could've Gone Mad - Poe)
I'm lost / and the shadows keep on changing (Haunted - Poe)
Time to gather up the splinters / Build a casket for my tears (Haunted - Poe)
A terrible thought could have a terribly long career (Terrible Thought - Poe)
Hey, you, poison the well / Watch it all burn, take 'em straight to hell. (Feed the Machine - Poor Man's Poison)
Failed once again I feel nothing can fix this / I've made a mistake, I'll try again / Instability, fragility, deficiencies, these tendencies / Stupidity, deformities, all these things they bothers me (Reform - QueenPb)
I wanna try and fly / I wanna try and die / I wanna be a pig / I wanna fuck a car. (Pig - Sparklehorse)
You're a mess / Your life's off track but your heart beats still / And you push away like I know you will / You go through the motions and lose motivation / You're lost and exhausted but won't stop fighting / You think that you're right but inside you're hiding it (Friends - Red Car Wire)
I’m haunted by the ghost / of you and my past colliding / I can never go home (Virginia (Wind in the Night) - The Head and The Heart)
Get me back on my own two feet / I would lie awake and pray you don't lie awake for me (Gloria - The Lumineers)
I am drowning / There is no sign of land / You are coming down with me / Hand in unlovable hand. (No Children - The Mountain Goats)
Give me drugs / so I don't have to think / Give me drugs / So I can concentrate (Give Me Drugs - Those Poor Bastards)
If you wanna see a man / With a lotta bad luck / Honey just look over at me (God Damned Me - Those Poor Bastards)
I'm worried that the stink I call my life, sir / Will end before I find a point to it (I am Lost - Those Poor Bastards)
I'm always dreamin' of the past / Forever haunted by the hourglass (No No No - Those Poor Bastards)
Change me / or take me as I am (Airwaves - Valencia)
Some days I float too far away / from every point I try to make (Dancing With A Ghost - Valencia)
I guess I fucked up / I guess I was wrong / I guess you wouldn't understand / I don't regret a single moment (Friday Night - Valencia)
I've been giving up / On ever plan that I've made / I'm finally waking up / but just a little too late (Somewhere I Belong - Valencia)
I don't know who I am or how I got here / But I'm a subtle hint best forgotten (Somewhere I Belong - Valencia)
But all I know is I've got to go / Before things get out of control / And out of our hands, beyond repair (Stop Searching - Valencia)
Anyway, I can try / Anything it's the same circle / that leads to nowhere / and I'm tired now / Anyway, I've lost my face / My dignity, my look / Everything is gone / and I'm tired now. (Monochrome - Yann Tiersen - I prefer the live version.)
"I prefer a shop which sells one thing to a shop which sells many things, and a supermarket, of course, tries to sell everything, and there is always something distrustful about a place so eager to please." (Poison for Breakfast by Lemony Snicket. pg86)
"But perhaps our confused talk already degenerates into an empty squabble over words." ("What is Metaphysics?" by Martin Heidegger) - asldkfj like you're one to talk.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
I don’t know. Everything? Is that an answer? Everything.
(Bee and PuppyCat, episode 3. )
Seriously Patrick, was I sick the day in school they taught you how to be a normal person? It just feels like there's something fundamental I'm missing out on. Like, is there an instruction manual? You get what I'm saying Patrick? It just-it just feels like everyone is in this cabal of normal people and they're all laughing at me like I'm the jester in my own Truman Show. Patrick, tell me what the secret is. Just tell me what the secret is. Is there a manual? Do you have a manual? I know you have a manual Patrick! I know it's in your truck Patrick!! - (Tell Me I'm Okay) Patrick. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, season 2, episode 12: Is Josh Free in Two Weeks.
I wasn't delusional. I was merely curious. (Before the Big Bang by Laura Merrsini-Houghton. pg7) - and other lies we tell ourselves after being awake for twenty hours.
“What do you do on vacations, Akashi-san?” “Why do I have to tell you something like that?” - The Tatami Galaxy, ep 1 Tennis Circle Cupid - saving that response. will never need it.
“Whatever comes into your head, sketch it before it’s gone, because if we’re in any way similar, believe me, it’ll go.” - David Airey, in Logo, Design, Love - thanks for calling me out on my bullshit. (Love that this is what my graphic design professor has us read.)
“You’re one of those that use so many names that you forget your own.” - F for Fake - . . .
"Finally, like a woman confessing a mortal sin, she said, 'Sometimes there are things that are more important than reading.'" - The Untold Story, by Genevieve Cogman. pg 224/5.
"I'm a sparkly mass of coherent thought and memories. You're a physical body who needs coffee and a few months of vacation. Observe the difference." - Coppelia to Irene in The Untold Story, pg337.
"I am the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classroom. Without these things, I am nothing. So now, I must shed innocent blood. Come with me." - Candyman (1992)
"I am the writing on the walls. I am the sweet smell of blood on the street. The buzz that echoes in the alleyways. They will say I shed innocent blood. You are far from innocent, but they will say you were. That's all that matters." - Candyman (2021)
"I am rumor. . . It’s a blessed condition, believe me. To live in people’s dreams; to be whispered at street corners; but not have to be. Do you understand?" - "The Forbidden" - Clive Barker
"Men have this incredible skill: they're able to have high opinions of themselves. Try finding an intelligent woman with that skill." - Hestia Strikes a Match, by Christine Grillo. pg39
"I had a special knack for draining the joy out of beautiful things." - Hestia Strikes a Match, by Christine Grillo. pg201
“Had I paid attention from the beginning of the semester the way I should have, Dr. Able would have had no reason to put the fear of God into me about faling, and I wouldn’t have turned Organic Chemistry Today into an extension of my arm. Who knew a chemistry book could act as bait for pretty girls?” - The Dutch House, by Anne Patchett. pg144
"To tell me so much/To tell me absolutely nothing." - "De Occulta Philosophia" by Charles Simic
"Who put canned laughter/Into my crucifixion scene?" - "The Voice at 3:00 A.M." by by Charles Simic. (it's a couplet. that's the entire poem.)
"'I bathe in the blood of my enemies,' I wanted to tell her. 'It's simply wonderful for the complexion!'" - The Diamond Eye, by Kate Quinn. pg303.
"Wait / do not leave yet. / Let me rearrange the world / for you." - Faraj Bou al-Isha trans. Khaled Mattawa
"Frederic sings while they devour him; a new song, his own song, a sweet thing that smells of summer and rosemary. His smile is beatific. As his toes and his calves are winnowed to bone (...) like fish, they nibble at his fingertips. It is only when his stomach has been excavated, abdominal cavity hollowed into a perfect blackness (...)" - "An Ocean of Eyes" by Cassandra Khaw.
"Her voice was dark and golden, like the C string on a cello, the sound of earth moving in concert with the stars. It wasn't an innocent laugh, though. Nothing naive. There was jags of glass broken in its undercurrents, giddy as a sip of absinthe (...)" - "A Secret of Devils" by Cassandra Khaw.
"...I was labeled 'that guy who can't read the room.' But that's a misunderstanding. I read the room more closely than anyone else and proceeded to purposely obliterate the atmosphere." - The Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi trans. Emily Balistrieri. pg29.
"The Takase river churned by, as shallow as the indie movies Jogasaki churned out as if possessed." - The Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi trans. Emily Balistrieri. pg34.
"...I had modestly kept my good sense and talents hidden so no one would find them, but I did such a good job that I hadn't been able to locate them myself..." - The Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi trans. Emily Balistrieri. pg37.
"Idiocy doesn't discriminate between sexes." - The Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi trans. Emily Balistrieri. pg95.
"I was living in an apartment larger than the surface of the Earth." - The Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi trans. Emily Balistrieri. pg277.
"What is impossible for Rebecca is possible for Becky." - Alejandro Zambra trans. Megan McDowell. pg28.
"You could stand even farther apart, each of you clinging to your corner, but that would be demonstrating something. It would be the same as embracing." - Alejandro Zambra trans. Megan McDowell. pg46.
"The tedium is the message." - Darren Wershler (quote appeared in Eunoia by Christian Bök). - this is perfect. Golden. I have died of laughter.
"licotic - adj. anxiously excited to introduce a friend to something you think is amazing (...) which prompts you to continually poll their face waiting for the inevitable rush of awe, only to cringe when you discover all the work's flaws shining through for the first time (...) Pronounced 'lahy-kot-ic.'" - from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig.
"harmonoia - n. an itchy sense of dread when life feels just a hint too peaceful (...) with an eerie stillness that makes you want to brace for the inevitable collapse, or burn it down yourself (...) Pronounced 'hahr-muh-noi-uh.'" - from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig - the story of my life.
"typifice - n. a caricature of yourself that went out of date years ago, though nobody around you seems to have noticed (...) pronounced 'tip-uh-fis.'" - from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig - glaring at the parents here.
"And now here you are. Sometimes you find yourself wondering if you can change, even if you wanted to. If you still have enough fire in the belly to surprise yourself, or if you're already set in your ways, too tough and cynical to stretch without shattering. Maybe you spent so long wondering who you were going to be one day, you forgot that that question actually has an answer, and that 'one day' would soon arrive." - from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. pg64, about 'alazia - the fear that you're no longer able to change.'
"redesis - n. a feeling of queasiness while offering someone advice, knowing they might well face a totally different set of constraints and capabilities (...)---which makes you wonder if all of your hard-earned wisdom is fundamentally nontransferable (...) pronounced 'ruh-dee-sis.'" - from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig
"anechosis - n. a state of exhaustion with continually being told what you want to hear (...); the longing for someone to have the heart to finally call you out on your bullshit (...) pronounced 'an-uh-koh-sis.'" - from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig
“I’m coming to a place / that nobody was talking about.” - ---
"Ladies' stockin's and exotic bean water. Gods help us." - from Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree
"We've had hell's own bard here, today. Why not a chess-playing phantom?" - from Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree
"I still think murderin' them in their beds would be safer." - from Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree
"Knock 'em dead. Figuratively, please." - from Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree
"Dating Erin would be like dating a blender. Sure, it makes great smoothies, but one day you're going to be minding your own business and it's going to switch on and remove your hand." - from Middlegame by Seanan McGuire. pg233.
“You won’t accept a guy’s tongue in your mouth and you’re gonna eat [sushi]?” - The Breakfast Club (1983)
“What do you need a fake ID for?” “So I can vote.” - The Breakfast Club (1983)
“Are you a cutter?” “Nope, not that on trend.” “Some of these girls are cutters?” “Oh yeah, we got a lot of overachievers in here.” - To the Bone (2017)
“You know you want it.” “Don’t make it a sex thing.” “It is a sex thing, don’t pretend it’s not.” - To the Bone (2017)
“We can pick a different disease for different restaurants.” - To the Bone (2017)
“Tell me it’s not the Holocaust museum. My mother took me there to make me feel shitty. You know, about starving. It’s okay, we’re Jewish.” - To the Bone (2017) - heard variations of this an excessive amount of times. You can't guilt certain people into eating (well, chewing and swallowing).
“I will die one day. Then what?” “Then we’ll all get a good night’s sleep.” - Tart (2001)
"The articles and books that tumble in such profusion from the printing presses of the academic world are all too often shot through with a wholly unconscious naïveté as to what makes the history of philosophy an independent discipline (...)" - from Denis O'Brian's foreword to Leo Sweeney's Divine Infinity in Greek and Medieval Thought
"You ever think about purpose?" "I love you, but I do not have time for this." - The Bear, s2e1
"I fell through a wall. Good morning." "Damn you got strong." - The Bear, s2e1
"Is this a terrible idea? (...) Cool. Good. Okay. Just making sure." - The Bear, s2e1
"How's your life been?" "I have no idea." - The Bear, s2 (probably e1 or e2. I didn't note.)
"Agnosthesia - n. - the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your own behavior, as if you were some other person---noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort you put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed (...) pronounced 'ag-nos-thee-zhuh.'"
"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why." - from Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. pg97
"When waking up, be an immovable mountain. When avoiding rent, be as swift as wind." - The Tatami Time Machine Blues, e1
"Every night we close our eyes and go to sleep, and for a few hours, quietly and safely, we go stark staring mad." - Neil Gaiman in "Reflections on Myth".
"All too often, I write to find out what I think about a subject, not because I already know." - Neil Gaiman in "Reflections on Myth".
"A battle with Ozu over the boundaries of space and time would not go well for me." - The Tatami Time Machine Blues, e2 - I AM DEAD. Excess of laughter. This exchange between the two of them has killed me. (Good riddance.)
"Isn't that dangerous? If you run into your parents, they might lose the urge to have you." - The Tatami Time Machine Blues, e2
"Is that really how my voice sounds? I sound like a weirdo." - The Tatami Time Machine Blues, e3 - more akashi love <3
"The stupidity of all this space-time shadow-boxing made me dizzy." - The Tatami Time Machine Blues, e3 - every instance of time travel in a nutshell.
"I was following Ozu. Ozu was following yesterday's me. Yesterday's me was following yesterday's Akashi. (...) In any case, Ozu has to be stopped." - The Tatami Time Machine Blues, e3
"Sleep is like being dead but without the commitment." - How Not to Kill Yourself, by Set Sytes.
"I like to make the worst possible decisions for my character just to see if I can make their life worse than mine." - How Not to Kill Yourself, by Set Sytes.
"Hobbies? Does lying face down on the floor count." - How Not to Kill Yourself, by Set Sytes.
"Though naturally ambitious, he savored the pleasure of having no ambitions at all." - The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa trans. Margaret Jull Costa
"I am a well of gestures never made, of words never thought or spoken, of dreams I forgot to dream until the end." - The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa trans. Margaret Jull Costa
"I am the ruins of buildings that were never more than ruins that someone, in the midst of building them, grew tired of even wanting to build." - The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa trans. Margaret Jull Costa
"I cannot find myself when I feel and if I go looking for myself, I don't know who it is looking for me. A sense of utter tedium saps my energy. I feel like an exile from my own soul." - The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa trans. Margaret Jull Costa
"I aspire to nothing. Life wounds me. I feel uncomfortable where I am and uncomfortable where I think I could be." - The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa trans. Margaret Jull Costa
"I don't believe in ghosts. But I do think places, like this motel room, I think they hold on to bad things, the way people hold on to memories. Grief. Pain. Disease. Addiction. I think when you enter a place that's absorbed enough bad things, it pukes them out at you. It drenches you in them. So a relatively innocuous room, like this one, will appear evil. Because bad things happened here." - Woom, by Duncan Ralston
"I mean, I waterboarded that poor bastard like it was shower time at Guantanamo." - Woom, by Duncan Ralston - DEAD.
"By this point, I have a decent idea of what sex is, mostly because I rode the bus to school for most of my life, and the kids who sit in the back of the bus teach you some shit whether you want to learn it or not." - Vagina Problems, by Lara Parker
"She’s brain dead, the doctor tells Alex and his father, and the first thing to pop into Alex’s mind is I could’ve told you that years ago." - Childhood At The Lost And Found" by Brian Hodge.
"The worst crime a man can inflict on himself is anonymity. It eats people alive inside if they go too long with their grubby little lives, not counting for anything, good or bad. They just exist. No one should have to live an anonymous life." - "Cancer Causes Rats" by Brian Hodge.
"So that suicide thing was working at me, like a Rubik’s Cube, or the pretty rock paperweight you pick up and turn over and over in your hand when there’s nothing better to do.
"I became a student of methodology whenever I saw some sort of mention in the paper, but few of the guaranteed, no-miss techniques appealed to me, because mostly they were very messy without the redeeming grandeur of the weatherman’s nosedive. Most of my housemates I didn’t want to burden with the grim task of cleanup, and there was no way of insuring that it fell to Camilla alone. That I could’ve lived with." - "Mostly Cloudy, Chance Of Kurt" by Brian Hodge.
“I’m addicted to emotions I haven’t even felt yet.” - "Heartsick" by Brian Hodge.
"It's morning, and I'm gay. It's noon, and I'm still gay. I have a feeling when it gets to be an evening, I'm still going to be gay." - Fluids by May Leitz.
"Even vomiting makes me happy because I'm vomiting for her. I never vomited for a boy except for the time some guy jammed his cock too far into the back of my throat, and I spat bile all over his stomach. The lurching was hilarious in hindsight." - Fluids by May Leitz.
"My fears of danger wash away into pure confusion. We spent the last hour trying to kill each other, and now she thinks this is a healthy thing." - Fluids by May Leitz.
"I want to die because my life is a monotonous cycle of falling in and out of love. She wants to die because no one will ever love her again. We're a match made in hell." - Fluids by May Leitz.
"You also seem to be good at idealizing and idolizing others. Only an idealist like you would be so haunted by presumed betrayal." - Alter Ego (defense - Denial)
"If you were happy every day of your life you wouldn't be a human being. You'd be a game-show host." - Heathers (1988)
"Suicide gave Heather depth, Kurt a soul, and Ram a brain. I don't know what it's given me, but I have no control over myself when I'm with J.D. Are we going to prom or to hell?" - Heathers (1988)
"I can see you being a teacher." "Really? Well, I can see you working in a coal mine." - (family; one of my sisters said this to the other)
"We never love anyone. We love only our idea of what someone is like. We love an idea of our own; in short, it is ourselves that we love." - The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa trans. Margaret Jull Costa
"The trick is, ghosts aren't easy to talk to. If it was easy, they'd tap you on the shoulder while you're making supper and ask you if you'd be willing to discuss their feelings about your house being built on their burial ground." - Episode 13, by Craig DiLouie.
"this is like getting a gig LARPing with some renaissance fair folks. and they all show up with real swords." - Episode 13, by Craig DiLouie.
"I feel like I know everything and that I really don't know anything." - Episode 13, by Craig DiLouie - this is from one of Claire's journal entries. That one was exhilarating.
"Then a ghost could reach into your rib cage and crush your heart without you knowing it until you were dying. It could claw across your brain's neural pathways and leave you a gibbering vegetable. It could sever your femoral artery and make you bleed to death from the inside. It could puncture a lung. It could flatten your eardrums and yank out your optic nerves and cut your spinal cord---" - Episode 13, by Craig DiLouie.
"I'm in love with another. I've fallen head over heels for an anomaly in the laws of physics." - Episode 13, by Craig DiLouie.
"Claire looks like she ate a dead rat, but the rat had a drug inside it that gave her superpowers." - Episode 13, by Craig DiLouie.
"The journey is the destination. To the end or back to the beginning. A labyrinth or a maze. Beware the Minotaur either way." - Episode 13, by Craig DiLouie.
"Research on younger children requires the cooperation of parents, caregivers and teachers (...) while attracting adolescent participants is an art in itself." - "Friendship: An old concept with a new meaning?" - Yair Amichai-Hamburger et. al.
"But, with every barbed thought, I sensed my feet pushed down harder on the accelerator as if I were gleefully headed toward doom, as if I had caught a glimpse of Hell for the first time and needed to marvel further at its vast wealth of wonders.” - Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes - Eric LaRocca
“Chewing on that—the way the little eggs burst between my teeth like sunflower seeds.” - Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes - Eric LaRocca
“His look conveyed both that he knew exactly who I was and what I wanted, but also that he held a similar secret. We locked eyes for what could only have been seconds, but it was enough; we were two deviants who had recognized one another in an identifying game of telepathy.” - Tampa - Alissa Nutting
"Bear with me. I'll have something to say for myself sometime soon. When I remember who I thought I was in the first place. Even if I've been displaced a little from wherever that was." - McKenzie Wark, in I'm Very into You.
"Most of these people I can’t remember. God bless them, but they’ll never forget me." - Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
"It’s tough not to come here and soak up the blame for every crime in history. You want to shout in everybody’s old toothless face. Yes, I kidnapped that Lindbergh baby.
"The Titanic thing, I did that.
"That Kennedy assassination deal, yeah, that was me.
"The big World War II gizmo, that atom bomb contraption, well guess what? That was my doing.
"The AIDS bug? Sorry. Me, again." - Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
“It’s not that I’m an ingrate, but if all you can cut me is fifty bucks, next time just let me die. Okay? Or better yet, stand aside and let some rich person be the hero.” - Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
“Nobody can expect you to remember every near-death experience. For sure, I should keep better notes, hair and eye color at least, but for real, look at me here. As it is, I’m already drowning in paperwork.” - Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
“Then came Feng Shui, the kid remembers, and the clients wanted an exorcism and they wanted her to tell them where to put the sofa. Clients would ask where did the bed need to go to avoid being in the path of cutting chi from the corner of the dresser. Where should they hang mirrors to bounce the flow of chi back upstairs or away from open doors. It turned into that kind of job. This is what you do with a graduate degree in English.” - Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
“This feels less like I’m a rapist than I’m a plumber.” - Choke - Chuck Palahniuk - the women use him as much as he uses them, so all's fair. Still hilarious.
"I don't know who I was when I wrote that book but I'm not that person anymore." - McKenzie Wark, in I'm Very into You.
"Let's cut to the chase, Louise. Did he find your black hole or what?" - The Passion of Alice - Stephanie Grant - Maeve & sex were a good combo. How she talks about it was entertaining.
"I want to know you. I want to find a territory with you. I'm not sure what it is, but I want to find it." - McKenzie Wark, in I'm Very into You.
“We were different people, and there was nothing remotely natural or even plausible in our partnership, but operating contrary to expectations and remaining ever-conscious of the act gave both of us a mainline to euphoria. This made the secrecy of the affair absolutely crucial. My parents looked the other way, but Kayo still took every precaution in maintaining the ruse. Not because she feared a scandal, but for the pure satisfaction of consummate deceit.” - Star - Yukio Mishima
“No matter how many scenes we’d already filmed, once I was behind the camera with the film unspooling, time flowed like the cool, clear waters of a high ravine, where I could swim my way upstream. My body took on buoyancy, and even walking the same ground as before felt like something more than walking. I became the force of time incarnate, following a steady rhythm, passing through the scripted motions one by one like they were floating weeds that curled around my body and slipped off of me and drifted away.” - Star - Yukio Mishima
“Being a woman sucks!” “Preaching to the choir here. Women are the worst.” - some episode of New Girl
"Exploring derelict locations forced me to pay close attention to what was directly in front of me so I didn't fall through a floor, get exposed to toxic molds or asbestos, or get caught by security. There was no room in my mind for whatever middling nonsense I usually dwelled on every day. It was the perfect distraction from real life." - Impossible People - Julia Wertz
"Everyone says that money doesn't buy you happiness, but I'd at least like the chance to find out firsthand." - Impossible People - Julia Wertz
"I failed life even before I had lived it, because even as I dreamed it, I failed to see its appeal." - The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa trans. Margaret Jull Costa
"They got guns?" "They're adult men who still use chat rooms. Of course they have guns." - Inside Job, s1e6.
"Of course Reagan's screwed up. She spent nine months inside of you!" - Inside Job, s1e6.
"You're boring! You're fucking boring, Steve, and the only thing keeping us together is inertia, and I feel more attachment to this disposable fork than I do to you!" - Inside Job, s1e7.
"I really don't have the emotional bandwith for multiple sex cults right now." - Inside Job, s1e7
"This is going to be the most globally damaging midlife crisis since Elon Musk." - Inside Job, s2e1
"Why, I wondered, did this clan who trusted “hard work” always defer their own pleasure, their own happiness, to some vague point in the future? It would be too late, wouldn’t it?" - Grotesque - Natsuo Kirino trans. Rebecca Copeland
"A woman who does not know herself has no choice other than to live with other people’s evaluations. But no one can adapt perfectly to public opinion. And herein lies the source of their destruction." - Grotesque - Natsuo Kirino trans. Rebecca Copeland
"We should have bolted, but oddly, we weren’t afraid. We’d gone beyond terror. It’s sad to say, but we were resigned. The thing could have come out of the basement to drag us down one by one right then, and I’m not sure we would have fought it." - Episode 13, by Craig DiLouie.
"I was nothing and everything. The tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear if it makes a sound or not. I was there and not there, listening to the silence of the tree falling and not falling." - Episode 13, by Craig DiLouie.
"I’ve always regarded irrational behavior, a loss of control, as alluring and sexy but also frightening to the point of panic." - Episode 13, by Craig DiLouie.
"The boyfriend she had when we first met was this NME-cut-out, landfill-indie looking cunt with a porkpie hat and a huge fringe. She liked Harry Styles a few years ago, and now she likes that white-bread, absolute fucking baguette of a lad from Call Me by Your Name." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"Anything would sound bad if you put it like that, Flo. Oh, Jurassic Park, is that the Jeff Goldblum dinosaur necromancy film?" - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"I feel like I’m at lunch with a fucking Daily Mail comments section." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"She offers to buy me an outfit as a treat. I accept, begrudgingly. A lifetime with this woman has taught me that I can be bought. Quite easily, in fact. She treats me to a little black dress from the sale at the soon-to-close-down branch of Westwood, and I’m just as giddy as a schoolgirl by the end of the afternoon." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"When you don’t get any pussy and spend your teens falling down the free porn rabbit hole, you end up like one of those freaks with an ahegao profile picture on Twitter and an internet history that’s seventy-five per cent bukkake, twenty-five per cent tragic Google searches." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"Flo once said she thought boys’ bums look like they’ve been shrunk in the wash, and I haven’t been able to un-see that since." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"Wife Goals, or Life Goals? as Flo is wont to say when confronted with a beautiful woman." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"This is also where I met Flo; where I caught the social equivalent of a nasty case of herpes, if you like." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"The shock value of dirty drawings was clearly non-existent at this level, and the frequent accusations from a sixty-something-year-old man of being cock hungry on a deep-seated psychological level got very tiresome, very quickly." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"Unfurling from an A3 sketchbook like a Dead Sea Scroll falls my result: an enormous ballpoint drawing of a penis, captioned simply with, je suis not un le penis." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"The kind of general, miscellaneous artsy people I see fucking everywhere but have never spoken to. They’re a rotation of background extras in my life, a handful of unnamed NPCs with repeating models populating the playable areas of the city." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"I could train a camera on a man and look at him like a man looks at a woman; boys, too, could be objects of desire." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"Like, do I send him a text? Just checking, Will, did you and your useless dick half-heartedly try to rape me last night?" - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"She tries to touch me, and I lean away from her hand, moving closer to the toilet. Which, to be fair, has proven to be a stalwart ally in the last twelve hours." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"I’m not wearing a swastika armband (David has cleverly altered the outfit and replaced the swastika with a penis) but I am holding a huge dildo." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"At the time it felt revolutionary, but everything does when you’re twenty." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"I couldn’t hear anything through the paper-thin wall, so I nudged the broken door open, and found him perched on the toilet lid, chewing a used tampon he’d fished out of my bathroom bin. One hand in his jeans, eyes half-shut, head tipped back. He didn’t notice me till the flash went off on my camera." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"Basic feminist internet discourse has made her think she’s sex positive, comfortable discussing the minutiae of her sex life and other people’s sex lives. She isn’t. I know she isn’t, because I’ve fucked her, so I don’t know why she even pretends with me." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"Every time you open your mouth, or put your hands on me, or send me a text, I don’t know if I’m about to fall to bits or feel brand new." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"I’m glad she’s still quantifying how much she wants to do stuff by how many dicks she’d suck to do it." - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"I actually make a few attempts at a reply: I literally wanted to kill you? I almost cut your nipples off? You went purple? What about any of that read as safe, sane or consensual?" - Boy Parts - Eliza Clarke
"Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these specters." - How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read - Pierre Bayard
"One book I found not long ago was full of random characters except for pages 111 to 222, wherein I found an exposition that speculated that God had created the universe as a way of sorting through the great library, finding those books that were most beautiful and meaningful." - A Short Stay in Hell - Steven L. Peck
"Do you have any idea how long eternity is? My heavens, what an imagination you humans have. What kind of God would leave you burning forever?" - A Short Stay in Hell - Steven L. Peck
"How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives?" - A Short Stay in Hell - Steven L. Peck
"The absurdity of it has never left me. We can’t care about anything here. We can’t make a difference – all meaning has been subtracted, we don’t know where anything comes from or where it goes. There’s no context for our lives." - A Short Stay in Hell - Steven L. Peck
"Brian neither showers nor masturbates. I’m not sure if this delights or disappoints me, to be honest. He simply sits alone, with his feeling of not aloneness fully intact and his feeling of not quite rightness and his feeling of uncertainty at what he witnessed." - A God of Hungry Walls, by Garett Cooke
"She is not an awful lay. I can almost see what he sees in her. There is value in her cunt, strength her mind and will are lacking." - A God of Hungry Walls, by Garett Cooke
“He said his family had always owned this place – everybody knew that -
and I should get lost. I agreed I probably should. It would be best for
everybody.” - The Time Machine Did It - John Swartzwelder
“It’s said that the first person who raises a hand in
violence is the person who’s run out of ideas. That’s usually me. I run out of
ideas fast. Violence I’ve got plenty of.” - The Time Machine Did It - John Swartzwelder
“On the way back to the office I
stopped and questioned a burglar who I happened to see robbing a house. - The Time Machine Did It - John Swartzwelder
After a half dozen questions, the
burglar became impatient. “Hey look, Burly, if you’re going to keep asking me
questions, at least give me a hand with some of these bulkier items.” - The Time Machine Did It - John Swartzwelder
I helped him carry a stereo out to
his getaway car and tie up and gag the homeowner, while I questioned him some
more. He said he didn’t know anything about any time machine. He said I should
ask H.G. Wells. I wrote down the name.” - The Time Machine Did It - John Swartzwelder
“Some tough boys came around the corner and started heading my way,
fitting brass knuckledusters onto their hands. This didn’t look like just a
warning. This looked like something more painful than that. Maybe we were past
the warning stage.” - The Time Machine Did It - John Swartzwelder
“She folded me in her arms and said she couldn’t live without me,
which was confusing because she’d been living without me for about thirty six
years, by my estimate, judging by her teeth.” - The Time Machine Did It - John Swartzwelder
“On an impulse I mooned most of the
1950’s as I went by. I don’t know what makes me do these things. I guess it’s
just part of my charm.” - The Time Machine Did It - John Swartzwelder
"You're at the spiritual pharmacy known as Walmart when you should be in class." - [unknown guy from discrete structures, calling someone not in class]
"See cyberpunk isn't a world in decline to me. The world already was in decline. Cyberpunk is the response to the world in decline...When the status quo is too cumbersome to adapt to the changes it enabled and the national plan doesn't work for a minority, that minority will adapt to those changes and use them nimbly and in unexpected ways." - The_Artifacer
"no artistic material shall be spared from my creative wrath" - encounters-ltd
“…sharing is caring and I have enough mental illness to go around.” - ao3 submitted to dear-ao3
“You don't want to call it love because that sounds so far away.” - google translate of “你不想把它称为爱，因为那听起来太遥远了。” in 逆流
“#whenever a gacha game makes me feel pressured to waste time on a bullshit event i think: #’am i enjoying this or am i making ice cubes’ #and then i quit the event lmao” - tumblr is oddly on-point today :(
“You're not having gay sex on the fourth of July, you're having archive of our own explicit tagged fanfics on the fourth of July.” - tumblr
“When did we hardwire into our language the idea that the step past friendship is mutual face licking? (…) You should say ‘Do you want to be monogamous face licking partners?’” - How to Be More Than Friends: Question Tuesday - vlogbrothers - this phrase makes sense. Love the rant about ‘just friends.’ Just sounds demeaning; refusing to acknowledge how close friends can be. (As if I know anything about that). Dunno, I’m the one who plays with writing platonic intimacy.
"No you cannot fix your entire life at 2am. Go to bed." - tumblr again - stop calling me out like this! (frowns) (frowns) (frowns) i'm sure this time will be different!
“as if I need another damned project.” - the motif deck - hahahahahahahaha. me? starting ANOTHER project? Who woulda thunk.
"Living too long is bad for the environment." - --
“let’s stay here and roleplay / a person who loves and a person / who can be loved back” - tumblr - feel like this would make for a good fanfic.
"at times when hope is too big of a thing to have, curiosity (even clinical or small) is a very good placeholder "- still spending too much time on tumblr
"They're adults now, I expect them to act accordingly. You know, assume things from a first impression, gossip over the fence, jump to their own conclusions, make poorly backed up decisions because it feels right..." - What Are You Up To?
"people who think writers are in control of the story clearly have never spoken to a writer" - one very true quote from a tumblr
"'Hot and bothered' in the sense that it is 90 degrees out and I am extremely annoyed" - on the tumblogs again.
"We all have our little delusions. The important thing is that we cling to them, and we never let go, no matter how much evidence gets in the way" - The Hunger - Contrapoints.
"i eat up tension like a starving man" - anon comment on hard at work - you and me both, stranger. My taste in fanfic in a nutshell: who needs sex or romance when you can have TENSION. If it were typical in ao3 culture I'd be responding to their comment. All of the little things that aren't inherently sexual but then are is lovely. Chef's kiss. (I also enjoy seeing some of the comments on the fic. Yeah, finding out that Verg has an office. Is. Well. Verdante nation indeed).
"Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with 'fiat' currency in exchange for it." - Cory Doctorow, The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok.
"I could eat alphabet soup and shit out a better conversation than you!" - wasted melody
"AI was meant to take over the menial jobs so we could all devote ourselves to higher art and better lives. Instead we’ve made AI that can take over artistic endeavours so we have more time to toil at work. Seems kind backwards." - Too_Many_Weasels
"Starting your day with 8-10 hours in the wilderness lets you cope well with the rest of the day anyway" - sufiblade in the comments
"“Soul mates” are grown, not born. It’s not some mystic destiny of bonding between two people. It’s the growth into each other’s “perfect” partner through experience and adversity. You know that old couple who’s been together for 50 years who can finish each other’s sentences and just sit and bask in their presence all day? Soul mates. It’s a learned partnership, not destiny." - Heather_Dudley
"[Soulmates] sounds more like fuel to the fire of misery with modern dating these days as certain people look for ways to absolve themselves of any self-improvement (“I don’t need to change because I’m already perfect for my soulmate”) or put in any real effort to finding someone (“I don’t need to put myself out there more as my soulmate will just find me.”)" - DJ0Hybrid
"The thing is, magic is also f***ing exhilarating. It's waking up in a society of mostly sleepers. It's learning to talk to everything and then having everything answer you back. It's learning how to still your mind; how to travel within yourself; how to raise power; how to connect with the land; how to heal. It's learning how to be of service in ways that are badly needed but that few have the training to be able to help. It's learning to perceive the deeper layer to everything that has inspired poets, thinks, artists and scientists for generations." - FraterALA
"Sherlock takes the core concept of the storytelling of Sherlock Holmes and why it works, crumples it up, hides it in one of six busts of Napoleon and then uses them as clubs to kill baby seals." - Sherlock Is Garbage, And Here's Why - hbomberguy
"Ok that's such a fucking ridiculous stretch😂or is it...... but we do yoga here right?" - reddit - was a stretch. (Hopefully.)
"Where did the time go. You're finding that you're having to ask that question more and more these days. Where did it go, though. Why did it go." - Down the Rabbit Hole
In a thread asking for "Books where the main character is self-destructive, where the main character intentionally sabotages his life.": "My autobiography should be ready for publication by June." - reddit
"Humans. All the same. ‘I don’t want to murder!’, ‘But that’s my mom you’ve kidnapped’, ‘You can’t kill something with an apple corer!?’" - Gold
"The thing about life is that it never seems to stop. It never even slows down so that someone can catch their breath." - nostalgic for disaster - sunkelles
“Honestly, Chernobyl is less toxic than your mental state. They could touch the elephant’s foot and end up less fucked up than if they took a trip into your head.” - nostalgic for disaster - sunkelles
"Gods have no power with no belief. No one believing in them and no one follows them. Boiled down, humans create gods." - reversing atrophy - moroodors
"'Student centered instruction.' I've always wondered what the alternative is, furniture centered?" - u/luncheroo
"I understand my own nature... good and evil have nothing to do with it." - idksomebody
"This song always makes me want to autopsy myself, find what it was inside of me that you saw and sent this song to. We were 14, younger than I remember, and I still don't see myself with anyone else but you. You put this on a playlist scribbled on a scrap of wrapping paper, and I kept that paper in the box in the closet next to all the pieces of my past lives' hearts. Really good song!" - firepowder in the comments
"Take the train down sometime. Sell your arteries for a ticket backward. Kill your idea of yourself and weep at its grave. Don't let your friends join the military. Tell your job to fuck off. Grab some sidewalk city shadows and inhale deeply. Remember this." - october 19. got home safe
"Why do I want to return? Why, for the past five years, have all my hopes and desires amounted to a kind of return?" - saddleblasters
"Here lies my Digital Grave. A Museum Of Me." - neet elite
"Honestly, the best tonic for keeping the black dog at bay isn't the love of family and friends, beautiful sunsets, or threats of some theological consequence it's 'Fuck it, we'll just see where this bullshit goes.'" - OrangeJuliusEvolva
"tbh one of my biggest irrational fears is that one day I'll stumble on a snark sub for myself, at which point I will delete all social media and go live in the woods for a while because I have clearly fucked something up." - otokoyaku
"Life on earth is exactly like autoerotic asphyxiation. Just plain dumb." - inspirobot
"I've gone for maximum cringe on this one." - [comp professor] - top 10 things you never want to hear a professor say about an assignment.
"Our college obviously follows the law (...boring info)" - [advising presentation] - as opposed to ????
"If 1 + 1 = 3, then [capital] is the capital of [state]." - [discrete math professor]
"When I watched the way he treated Olivia I began to suspect that what he relished most was drawing out a person’s emotions and desires while remaining completely untouched by them." - Acts of Service - Lillian Fishman
"There’s this thing, when you’re girls, where you circle each other, wondering what the other is thinking, wondering who will make the first move, what it means to make the first move, what it means to want something as a woman, let alone to want another girl." - Acts of Service - Lillian Fishman
"Jesus, Evie, my father said. His voice rose. All right, you don’t need anything, you don’t want anything, clearly, or you’d be making it happen for your goddamn self, wouldn’t you?" - Acts of Service - Lillian Fishman
"I’m just who you think I am. I do float through things on my own." - Acts of Service - Lillian Fishman
"I had an amorphous feeling around other people, like I was floating in an undifferentiated world." - Acts of Service - Lillian Fishman
"Look at that guy, he's having fun. Why haven't I figured that out?" - BoJack Horseman, s1e1
"If all of your friends are morons is it a felony, a misdemeanor or an act of God if you blow their fucking heads off with a thirty-eight magnum?" - American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
“He only wished Momma would kill them while the sun was shining rather than waiting ’til dark.” - Brother - Ania Ahlborn
“I picture Goldilocks brazenly masturbating in this bed while the Three Bears watch. She is daring them with her slitty eyes to tell her to stop. The Bears are too polite to say anything.” - Bunny - Mona Awad
“Fuck you, poets. You think you are so smart, so cool with your word art. You have no idea. Can you conjure hybrid spaces? Can you perform the Body and have the Body perform, literally? Can you make a Viking masseuse? A pre-TB Keats? A talky Tim Riggins?” - Bunny - Mona Awad
“Ethical, Bunny said, like we’d made the word up. Like it was just some silly monster we were trying to make out of our own hair, which she herself lovingly braided for us.” - Bunny - Mona Awad
“We need a cock that fucking works. I know I do.” - Bunny - Mona Awad
“You have no idea at all, do you? the bunny seems to say to me. Sad. Very sad, Samantha. To be lost like this. Sad, sad, sad that when someone asks you, What do you want? nothing comes to mind but a pair of fists clutching little broken bits.” - Bunny - Mona Awad
“She looks at me like perhaps I should examine that desire. Unpack it. Take it to lunch. Divine it via a tarot card, a rune stone, the mulch of a bitter herb I’ve chewed and then spit up.” - Bunny - Mona Awad
“And I let her go, let her leave, just sat there in a kitten dress, watching her say, I’m leaving. Gave her no words to come back by, no words to come back for. Just sat there with my mouth open, all my words still inside.
I feel the fist in my throat tighten. Burning, pounding head. Singing chills, skipping heart. Which I deserve.
Absolutely.” - Bunny - Mona Awad
“And then, of course, some take it too far. One poor young man chopped off an ear. That was... unfortunate, but also indicative. Of the deeper Transformation required by the Work. The Work does not come without Cost.” - Bunny - Mona Awad
“Whenever I read one of Victoria’s vignettes, I always feel so dumb because I can hardly understand them at all. And then I blame myself. I think, Kira, this must be just too brilliant for you to grasp. Surely you must have missed something. Even though there’s always been this small voice inside of me that says, Um, what the fuck is this, please? This makes no sense. This is coy and this is willfully obscure and no one but Victoria will ever get this. I would in fact need to live inside Victoria’s spoiled, fragmented, lazy, pretentious little mind to get it. And who apart from us, apart from me, is going to be willing to do that? To work all night with a Victoria Decoder? Who would even care to? And then I feel like screaming JUST SAY IT. TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED. TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK THIS MEANS AND WHAT YOU DID WITH HIM EXACTLY” - Bunny - Mona Awad
“Wondering what the hell just happened. Knowing nothing happened, knowing too that everything had changed. How empty and emptied I felt walking away with all my words still on his floor. Wanting so badly to pick them back up. Take it all back. Wipe away the night, my dumb tears, my endless tumbling out of words. I never meant to give this to you. How alone now.” - Bunny - Mona Awad
“Although we could hardly call her a heroine, could we? I mean, could we even call her that, Samantha?” Her bunny ear stumps twitch like antennae. “She’s quite passive, Samantha, isn’t she?” - Bunny - Mona Awad
“I pointed out that, for example, I could have him killed for $50. He said he could have me killed for $50 too. By the same guy. We stared at each other for awhile, fingering our wallets, then I decided to pay the additional rent.” - How I Conquered Your Planet - John Swartzwelder
“The problem was I wasn’t very good at things. Everybody knows somebody like that. And I was the guy I knew. I wasn’t very dependable either. And I guess I didn’t smell too good most of the time. I didn’t have much going for me, to be honest.” - How I Conquered Your Planet - John Swartzwelder
“Recognition is not the first step to change. Not in my experience, anyway.” - The New Me - Halle Butler
“Strangest of all, each time I closed my eyes and opened them, the walls seemed to have just stopped moving, as though they’d been in motion until that second and had only clicked into place when I opened my eyes.” - The Handyman - Bentley Little
"my code is duct tape and spaghetti" - [redacted classmate, but who hasn't said this]
"I stand there and have no idea what to do. I want to run. I want to collapse. I don't want to be arrested. I want Noah to hold me. I want to get high and wipe this all away. I want to be wiped away." - Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man - Bill Clegg
“You can trust me!” Randy yelled through the pain. “You can trust me!”
Frank leaned forward, smiling. “But I need you for attic insulation.” - The Handyman - Bentley Little
“Had he just thrown all this together, building willy nilly as the mood struck him? Or was there a method behind the madness? Had he designed the layers of this mazelike structure in a specific way so as to ensnare those who dared enter?
Had he designed it for me?” - The Handyman - Bentley Little
“The chanting was answered by a voice from the pit, a smooth, almost liquid voice that responded in a manner that I had never heard before, that no one had ever heard before. These were new words, words that had been spoken before only in Hell, and the sound of them rocked me to the core, grating against everything I knew or thought I knew, conjuring images I would not have believed myself capable of imagining.” - The Handyman - Bentley Little
“But face it, you’re never not you. No matter what world you create you’re always dealing with your own shit. Same shit, different mask.” - Consider This - Chuck Palahniuk
“Once you use a story or novel to explore and exaggerate and exhaust a personal issue, the issue itself seems to vanish.” - Consider This - Chuck Palahniuk
“The window in the kitchen had been open for weeks now. Cold air gusted in, overwhelming the rattling heater that sat coiled beneath the gap. I came into the kitchen to find empty potato chip bags, gum wrappers, and leaves, bits of debris scattered about the room. I left it. I embraced this new relationship with Mother Nature.” - Disintegration - Richard Thomas
“On my cv it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel “in progress” rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette.” - Bluets - Maggie Nelson
"Ive learned my lesson that once my code works i should never touch it again." - [computing classmate]
“The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.” - Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
“Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.” - Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
“This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty … what you will.” - Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
“We have so many points in common that it is like looking at myself in a cracked mirror.” - Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
“We stand on five minutes and devour centuries. You are the sieve through which my anarchy strains, resolves itself into words. Behind the word is chaos.” - Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
“People are like lice – they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused...I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death.” - Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
“So help me God, I can't see this guy as a writer.” - Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
“He thinks as he goes along" – very charming, charming indeed, as Borowski would say, but really very painful, particularly when the thinker is nothing but a spavined horse.” - Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
“tired of sitting on my ass all day long, tired of red wallpaper, tired of seeing so many people jabbering away about nothing.” - Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
“I sit down beside her and she talks – a flood of talk. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die.” - Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
“One can sleep almost anywhere, but one must have a place to work. Even if it's not a masterpiece you're doing. Even a bad novel requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy.” - Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
“I've lived out my melancholy youth. I don't give a fuck any more what's behind me, or what's ahead of me. I'm healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today! Le bel aujourd'hui!” - Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
"How can you, of all people, expect to keep anything? You couldn't even keep your own shadow!" - Passing for Human - Liana Finck
“To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.” - Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut
“Think of that: My father could have strangled the worst monster of the century, or simply let him starve or freeze to death. But he became his bosom buddy instead.
That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.” - Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut
"My science grade is making me gonna have to marry rich." - (sister dearest)
“How regularly and steadily things had gone downhill with me for a long time, till, in the end, I was so curiously bared of every conceivable thing. I had not even a comb left, not even a book to read, when things grew all too sad with me.” - Hunger - Knut Hamsun
“I hug myself with delight at her confusion; the irresolute perplexity in her eyes positively fascinates me. Her mind cannot grasp my short, passionate address. She has no book with her; not a single page of a book, and yet she fumbles in her pockets, looks down repeatedly at her hands, turns her head and scrutinizes the streets behind her, exerts her sensitive little brain to the utmost in trying to discover what book it is I am talking about.” - Hunger - Knut Hamsun
“I failed to recognize my own happy temperament, and I met with the most singular annoyances from all quarters. I could not sit down on a bench by myself or set my foot any place without being assailed by insignificant accidents, miserable details, that forced their way into my imagination and scattered my powers to all the four winds.” - Hunger - Knut Hamsun
“I let shoes be shoes, and it seemed to me that the distracted phase of mind I had just experienced dated from a long-vanished period, maybe a year or two back, and was about to be quietly effaced from my memory. I began to observe the old fellow.” - Hunger - Knut Hamsun
“Foul places began to gather in my inner being, black spores which spread more and more. And up in Heaven God Almighty sat and kept a watchful eye on me, and took heed that my destruction proceeded in accordance with all the rules of art, uniformly and gradually, without a break in the measure.” - Hunger - Knut Hamsun
“I had fully formed an opinion as to what it should not signify, but had come to no conclusion as to what it should signify.” - Hunger - Knut Hamsun
“The same darkness brooded over me; the same unfathomable black eternity which my thoughts strove against and could not understand. I made the most despairing efforts to find a word black enough to characterize this darkness; a word so horribly black that it would darken my lips if I named it.” - Hunger - Knut Hamsun
“Indeed, you are in a sorely tempted condition, fighting with the powers of darkness and great voiceless monsters at night, so that it is a horror to think of; you hunger and thirst for wine and milk, and don't get them.” - Hunger - Knut Hamsun
“There was no mistake about it; I was about to break down in earnest. Office hours from 12 to 4. I had knocked at the door an hour too late. The time of grace was over.” - Hunger - Knut Hamsun
“I had turned myself into a dog for the sake of a miserable bone, and I had not got it.” - Hunger - Knut Hamsun
“At first I had no clear idea of what had happened to me; I looked about me in amazement, felt a complete transformation of my being, absolutely failed to recognize myself again.” - Hunger - Knut Hamsun
“Yes, yes; I understand that well enough," I interrupted, although in truth I understood nothing more whatever.” - Hunger - Knut Hamsun
“No, in spite of all, there was really no salvation for me--no salvation! My brain was bankrupt!” - Hunger - Knut Hamsun