RANDOM LINES
"I was with her for way too long."
"Were you in love with her?" Ragins asks.
"I think that's what they call it," David says. "I was stupid."
"Maybe being stupid and being in love are the same thing," Ragins says.
The Soloist ; Steve Lopez
"Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world's greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding." Said The Shotgun To The Head ; Saul Williams
"Sorcery of self: a phrase I coined and now surrender to you. it's as if I swallowed an interior decorator. I like my heart where it is. I cannot make your past disappear. only rabbits, my love. only rabbits" Said The Shotgun To The Head ; Saul Williams
"He had spent his life solving problems. Now he had to solve another one." A Spot Of Bother ; Mark Haddon
"He and Tony should be living together. He should be coming home to lit windows and the sound of unfamiliar music. He should be lying in bed on Saturday mornings, smelling bacon and hearing the clink of crockery through the wall. He was going to take Tony to the wedding. All that bollocks about provincial bigotry. It was himself he was scared of. Getting old. Making choices. Being committed. It would be ghastly. Of course it would be ghastly. But it didn't matter what the neighbors thought. It didn't matter if Mum fussed over Tony like a lost son. It didn't matter if his father tied himself in knots over bedroom arrangements. It didn't matter if Tony insisted on a slow snog to Lionel Richie's "Three Times A Lady." He wanted to share his life with Tony. The good stuff and the crap stuff." A Spot Of Bother ; Mark Haddon
"Loving someone means taking the risk that they might fuck up your nicely ordered little life. And you don't want to fuck up your nicely ordered little life, do you?" A Spot Of Bother ; Mark Haddon
"Something dreadful? Why were old people always so fucking vague?" - A Spot Of Bother ; Mark Haddon
"What was Jamie going to say? It seemed so obvious what he felt. But when he tried to put it into words it sounded clumsy and unconvincing and sentimental. If only you could lift a lid on the top of your head and say, "Look." - A Spot Of Bother ; Mark Haddon
"Usually when I was forced to compete, it was my tactic to simply give up. To try in any way was to announce your ambition, which only made you more vulnerable. The person who wanted to win but failed was a loser, while the person who didn't really care was just a weirdo -- a title I had learned to live with." Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim ; David Sedaris
"I can't seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen. "Yes, your Tiki god is very handsome, but we're here to talk about Jesus." Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim ; David Sedaris
"The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice." Vanity Fair ; William Makepeace Thackeray
"He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works. The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines. And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage. I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but nto always as a bread-slicing machine. It makes it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside it." The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time ; Mark Haddon
"I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty." The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time ; Mark Haddon
"... And I knew that it meant "happy," like when I'm reading about the Apollo space missions, or when I am still awake at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. in the morning and I can walk up and down the street and pretend that I am the only person in the whole world." The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time ; Mark Haddon
"It hurts to say that," he said, shrugging. "But better to get hurt by the truth, than comforted with a lie." The Kite Runner ; Khaled Hosseini
"Like how when you're a kid, you don't know squat, and by the time you get older and figure out what you could have done and should have done, it's too damn late. So you can have a lot of regrets if you're not careful. And how all that messed up my head so deep, it convinced me for a little bit of awhile that maybe I should die before I hit eighteen, just to show for real how bad I was feeling. And now. Now I don't even know what happened, but I'm thinking Damn. I'm here, I'm alive. What's next?" America ; E.R. Frank
"We are all victims of what is done to us. We can either use that as an excuse for failure, knowing that if we fail it isn't really our fault, or we can say, "I want something better than that, I deserve something better than that, and I'm going to try to make myself a life worth living." My Lobotomy ; Howard Dully
"And then I thought about how for a long time scientists were puzzled by the fact that the sky was dark at night, even though there are billons of stars in the universe and there must be stars in every direction you look, so that the sky should be full of starlight because there is very little in the way to stop the light from reaching earth. Then they worked out that the universe was expanding, that the stars were all rushing away from one another after the Big Bang, and the further the stars were away from us the faster they were moving, some of them nearly as fast as the speed of light, which is why their light never reached us. I like this fact. It is something you can work out in your own mind just by looking at the sky above your head at night and thinking without having to ask anyone. And when the universe has finished exploding, all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all begin to fall toward the center of the universe again. And then there will be nothing to stop us from seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be moving toward us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billons and billons of stars, all falling. Except that no one will see this because there will be no one left on the earth to see it. They will probably have become extinct by then. And even if there are people still in existence, they will not see it because the light will be so bright and hot that everyone will be burned to death, even if they live in tunnels." - The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night Time ; Mark Haddon
"People at Spin ridicule me for wearing khaki shorts to work, always insisting that I look like a tourist. I don't care. We're all tourists, sort of. Life is tourism, sort of. As far as I'm concerned, the dinosaurs still hold the lease on this godforsaken rock." - Killing Yourself To Live ; Chuck Klosterman
"No one who is young is ever going to be old." - East of Eden ; John Steinbeck
"He slipped his hand into mine, and I thought, An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand..." - The History of Love ; Nicole Krauss
"The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity--it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possesive love that grabs at what it can." - Life of Pi ; Yann Martel
"Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What — suddenly you’ve magically turned into Noam Chomsky?" - JPod ; Douglas Coupland
"The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless." - JPod ; Douglas Coupland
"Without hope, the need to punish is the one true religion. Blame must be fixed on some soul other than one's own. Justice must be done. Or else there is only the desert of grief and one's own footsteps upon it - relentless, unceasing, as alone as the most distant planet in the universe." - Reservation Road ; John Burnham Schwartz
"Nobody believes the identites we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow."
- Girlfriend In A Coma ; Douglas Coupland
"We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate to pretend that things are okay, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. Maybe not out loud, if it's going to get you into trouble: "I wish I'd never married him." "I wish she was still alive." "I wish I'd never had kids with her." "I wish I had a whole shitload of money." "I wish all the Albanians would go back to fucking Albania." Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you're living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies just for one minute." - A Long Way Down ; Nick Hornby
"Even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go." - Stephen Chbosky ; The Perks of Being a Wallflower
"And in that moment, I swear we were infinite." - Stephen Chbosky ; The Perks of Being a Wallflower
"It's raining. The kind of rain that comes down so heavy, it sounds like the shower's running, even when you've turned it off. The kind of rain that makes you think of dams and flash floods, arks. The kind of rain that tells you to crawl back into bed, where the sheets haven't lost your body heat, to pretend that the clock is five minutes earlier than it really is. Ask any kid who's ever made it past fourth grade, and they can tell you: water never stops moving. Rain falls and runs down a mountain into a river. The river finds its way to the ocean. It evaporates, like a soul, into the clouds. And then, like everything else, it starts all over again." - Jodi Picoult ; My Sister's Keeper
"It’s silly," Eilonwy added, "to worry because you can’t do something you simply can’t do. It’s like trying to make yourself taller by standing on your head." - Lloyd Alexander ; The Book of Three
"Her heart, Bob Arctor reflected, was an empty kitchen: floor tile and water pipes and a drainboard with pale scrubbed surfaces, and one abandoned glass on the edge of the sink that nobody cared about." - A Scanner Darkly ; Philip K. Dick
"Had I known but yesterday, what i know today, I'd have taken out your two gray eyes and put in eyes of clay. And had I known but yesterday you'd be no more my own I'd have taken out your heart of flesh and put in one of stone." - fable of Tam Lin as relayed in The Dogs of Babel ; Carolyn Parkhurst
"We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is." - East of Eden ; John Steinbeck
"I became a criminal when I fell in love." - Louise Gluck ; Siren
"Because when we love, we always strive to become better than we are." - Paulo Coelho ; The Alchemist
"There is not a name for what I’m feeling. There is no description for it. To call it yearning would be like calling the ocean 'water'." - R.A. Nelson ; Teach Me
FAVORITE FIRST LINES "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." — William Gibson, Neuromancer
"Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women." — Charles Johnson, Middle Passage
"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." — Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche
"If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog." — Saul Bellow, Herzog
"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." — Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person." — Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups
"A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead." — Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
"We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall." — Louise Erdrich, Tracks
"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." — C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
"I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story." — Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
"Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature." — Anita Brookner, The Debut
"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness." — Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
"A screaming comes across the sky." — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." — Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." — George Orwell, 1984
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair." — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
"I am an invisible man." — Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new." — Samuel Beckett, Murphy
"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
JOHNNY THE HOMICIDAL MANIAC by JHONEN VASQUEZ "Theres nothing terribly wrong with feeling lost, so long as that feeling precedes some plan on your part to actually do something about it. Too often a person grows complacent with their disillusionment, perpetually wearing their "discomfort" like a favorite shirt."
"I've excluded happiness as one of those possibilities we seek for ourselves. Oh, I still want it, but that's beside the point. Contentment - they say it's the ultimate, but I can't even wish for that. I don't even want the desire to be content. I can only hope for silence."
"The beginning is always so fine!! But decay soon follows. A degeneration into the tired old situation. The rot sets in ... there is only the beauty of the start!"
"I know forgiveness is out of the question. I just ask for what we all ask of the people we respect - that the thought of me does not compel you to violent spasms of projectile vomiting."
"It must be nice to still have the opportunity to save the cohesion of your pretty mind. The best some people can hope for is to better manage their damage."
"Nothing quite brings out the zest for life in a person like the thought of their impending death."
"We think we are so great in our protests...but we just become the bitter offspring of what we oppose. We become prisoners in our own cages. We begin to speak in badly constructed melodramatic prose!"
"I wish... I wish someone would just switch me off and... fix me."
"I detest sleep. I've got better things to do. Besides, I find it frightening - to awaken and be unsure of everything you remember about life not being just part of a dream. Waking means I've slept, and sleep dissolves what certainty I have left." VARIOUS SHAKESPEARE "For where thou art, there is the world itself, and where though art not, desolation." - Henry VI, Part II, Act iii, Sc.2
"Good night, sweet friend: thy love ne'er alter, till thy sweet life end." - A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act ii, Sc.3
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind". - A Midsummer Night's Dream Act I, Scene I
"These words are razors to my wounded heart". - Titus Andronicus Act I, Scene I
"Doubt that the sun doth move, doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt I love". - Hamlet Act II, Scene II
VEGAN FREAK by BOB & JENNA TORRES "You're at your company's annual BBQ and you're politely declining the charred meat on the grill. You're at the cafeteria desperately searching for something other than salad. You get invited to lunch with your co-workers and you try to suggest going for Chinese or Indian so you can eat something other than french fries. You're sitting in your office quietly eating the lunch you brought from home. In any case, just by trying to eke out an existence in the world of omnivores, you once again become the vegan freak."
LIFE IS A DREAM by PEDRO CALDERON DE LA BARCA "I am a man among beasts, and a beast among men; and, even though in such weight misfortunes I have studied political science, instructed by the beasts, informed by the birds, and have measured the orbits of the gentle heavenly bodies: you alone have interrupted my emotional response to my troubles, amazing my eyes and thrilling my ears."
"Aw-struck at seeing you, astonished at hearing you, I don't know what I can say to you, or what I can ask you. I'll only say that heaven has guided me here today to give me consolation, if it can be consolation to an unfortunate man to see another more unfortunate."
"The tale is told of a wise man who once was so poor and indigent that his sole nourishment was a few herbs he picked. "Can there be another man," he said to himself, "poorer and sadder than I?" And when he turned his face, he found the answer, beholding another wise man who was fathering the leaves that he had discarded. I was living in this world lamenting my fotune, and when I asked myself whether there was anoyone else with a more troublous fate, you kindly gave me the answer, because, on due consideration, I find that you would have gathered my sorrows to turn them into happiness for yourself. And if by chance my sowrrows can soothe you to some extent, listen to them closely and take any of them that are too many for me."
"Nothing dumbfounded me, because I had foreseen it all; but, if I were to wonder at anything in the world, it would be the beauty of woman. I read once in the books that I had that the creation that cost God the greatest effort was man, because he is a world in miniature; but now I suspect that it was woman, since she has become a heaven in miniature, and contains as much more beauty than man as the different between heaven and earth; and even more, if she's the one I now espy."
"I who saw your bright beams, to which the sun was a mere shadow and heaven and inadequate hint."
"Wherever Estralla enters, there is no place for shadow."
"You're clever and pretty, and you must know what love is."
"It's true, then: let me restrain my fierce nature, my fury, my ambition, in case I ever dream again. And I will since we exist in such a peculiar world that living is merely dreaming; and the experience teachers me that the man who lives dreams his reality until he awakes."
"All human happiness passes by in the end like a dream."
"Each time I look at you, you fill me with new wonderment, and the more I gaze on you the more I long to do so. I think my eyes must be morbidly thirsty, because, when drinking is death, they drink all the more, and to this effect: seeing that seeing gives me death, I am dying to see. But let me see you and die, because, by now overcome, I don't know - since seeing you gives me death - what not seeing you would give me. It would be something fiercer than death, anger, frenzy, and sharp pain; it would be life -for I have calculated its severity in this way- because giving life to an unfortunate man is like giving death to a fortunate one."
CANDY by LUKE DAVIES "But for now I drag through the weeks, one foot in the past and one in the future. I feel I am nothing but a dividing line. I don't know who I am. They tell me there's nothing wrong with that. They tell me today is all I have, and for the first time it begins to make sense. At times it seems like such hard work, to make it through each day. They say, of course, it's early days, everything is new, what did you expect? You can't sit on your arse and slide uphill. And I come to realize that all my small todays, the way I act, will lead into my tomorrows."
"It was sad too that feeling happy was frightening. It only meant wanting to feel even happier."
"When I stare at things or hear things, I think there might be some kind of beauty to them. I mean the little things, the way we make it through the day, experiencing pleasure. Trees in streets or a small bird fluttering around the garden, paint flaking from the kitchen windowpane, dust motes in sunlight, the wind through poplars, the tram bell signaling departure. I'm alert, you might say, to the beauty of these things, the local nuances that bring life alive. But all there is, is sadness."
"Life is a circle and death will make it a line."
"It's like you're cruising along in a beautiful car on a pleasant country road with the breeze in your hair and the smell of eucalyptus all around you. The horizon is always up there ahead, unfolding toward you, and at first you don't notice the gradual descent, or the way the atmosphere thickens. Bit by bit the gradient gets steeper, and before you realize you have no breaks, you're going pretty fucking fast. So what did we do, once the decent began? We learned how to drive well, under hazardous conditions. We had each other to egg each other on. There was neither room nor need for passengers. Maybe also we were thinking one day our car would sprout wings and fly. I saw that happen in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It's good to live in hope."
"The last time I felt this bad was never."
"It was one of those swooning summer nights in Sydney when the air is awash with the smell of jasmine and take-away satay and salt from the harbor. In Sydney it's easy to fall in love but so hard to go deep."
"There were people everywhere. I hated them all, since it was so hard to hate myself or my own life."
"But I think in the end, with all those holes, you kind of do something. It's like you have a container to hold your soul, and you turn it into a colander. So much of you leaks out, until there's barely anything left. And you just keep lowering your standards, to deal with barely anything. You just leak away. And if you're lucky, then one night in the silence, in the deep heart of the dark, you'll hear the distant trickling of blood in your veins. A weary world of rivers, hauling their pain through the dark heart. The heart like a tom-tom, beating the message that time is running out. You'll lie there strangely alert. You'll actually feel the inside of your body, which is your soul, or where your soul is, and a great sadness will engulf you. And from the sadness an itch might begin, the itch of desire for change." EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE BY JONATHAN SAFRON FOER
"I thought about all the things everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether its in a milllisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything thats born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped." "In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. And when something really terrible happened- like a nuclear bomb, or at least biological weapons attack- an extremely loud siren would go off, telling everyone to get to Central Park and to put sandbags around the reservoir." "Did you ever make a sculpture of me in your head?" I wrote, "How do you want me to pose?" She said the whole point was that I should choose, I asked if the carpeting was new, she said, "Look at me," I tried but I couldn't, she said, "Look at me or leave me. But don't stay and look at anything else."
"We need much bigger pockets, I thought as I lay in bed, counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met, but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe. But I knew that there couldn't be pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of."
"Why do beautiful songs make you sad?"
"Because they aren't true."
"Never?"
"Nothing is beautiful and true." |
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