“I remember being told in kindergarten not to talk too much,” I told him. “My teacher called me a chatterbox.”

“Wow,” Ryan said. “I don’t have any traumatic stories like that.”

(in How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti)

Orig: “Que el cielo exista, aunque nuestro lugar sea el infierno.”
Transaltion: “May Heaven exist, even if our place is Hell.”
-Jorge Luis Borges, Deutsches Requiem

“Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.” – Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

But I desire those ten beautiful books nonetheless. ;p

This, in Swedish: “Det enda som hjälper mot tankar är hud”, from the book Diva by Monika Fagerholm, I guess, in English, it would be something like “The only thing that helps against thoughts are skin”

“The Edge…There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there.”


― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels

“Those who were on the inside, the majority that is, for them it had been hard to get his point, mostly they were just pleased that they were on the inside, that they were the fittest.
For those on the outside, the fear and abandonment amounts to almost everything; everybody knows that.
Understanding is something one does best when one is on the borderline.”
Peter Hoeg “Borderliners”

“Just go on dancing with me like this forever, Garraty, and I’ll never tire. We’ll scrape our shoe on the stars and hang upside down from the moon.”

It’s heartbreaking how my favourite quote in the book was uttered out of delirium. From Stephen King’s “The Long Walk”.

Proverbs for Paranoids:
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
4. You hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

- T. Pynchon, “Gravity’s Rainbow”

That very night in Max’s room, a forest grew, and grew, and grew, until the ceiling hung with vines and the wall became the world all around.

My favorite section from “The Circular Ruins” by Jorge Luis Borges. It is about a man constructing a human in his dreams, one worthy of entering the physical world…

“He dreamed that it was warm, secret, about the size of a clenched fist, and of a garnet color within the penumbra of a human body as yet without face or sex; during fourteen lucid nights he dreampt of it with meticulous love. Every night he perceived it more clearly. He did not touch it; he only permitted himself to witness it, to observe it, and occasionally to rectify it with a glance. He perceived it and lived it from all angles and distances. On the fourteenth night he lightly touched the pulmonary artery with his index finger, then the whole heart, outside and inside. He was satisfied with the examination. He deliberately did not dream for a night; he took up the heart again, invoked the name of a planet, and undertook the vision of another of the principle organs. Within a year he had come to the skeleton and the eyelids. The innumerable hair was perhaps the most difficult task. He dreamed an entire man‐‐a young man, but who did not sit up or talk, who was unable to open his eyes. Night after night, the man dreamt him asleep.”

“Lots of people talk to animals,” said Pooh.
“Not that many listen
though.”
“That’s the problem.”

from the Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff

“That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”
― Charles Bukowski, from book called “Women”.

“After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.”
-Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK CONTRACEPTION IS IMMORAL BECAUSE THE OBJECT OF COPULATION IS PROCREATION. IN A SIMILAR WAY THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK THE ONLY REASON TO READ A BOOK IS TO WRITE A BOOK; PEOPLE SHOULD CALL UP BOOKS FROM THE DUST AND THE DARK AND WRITE THOUSANDS OF WORDS TO BE SENT DOWN TO THE DUST AND THE DARK WHICH CAN BE CALLED UP SO THAT OTHER PEOPLE CAN SEND FURTHER THOUSANDS OF WORDS TO JOIN THEM IN THE DUST AND THE DARK. SOMETIMES A BOOK CAN BE CALLED FROM THE DUST AND THE DARK TO PRODUCE A BOOK WHICH CAN BE BOUGHT IN SHOPS, AND PERHAPS IT IS INTERESTING, BUT THE PEOPLE WHO BUY IT AND READ IT BECAUSE IT IS INTERESTING ARE NOT SERIOUS PEOPLE, IF THEY WERE SERIOUS THEY WOULD NOT CARE ABOUT THE INTEREST THEY WOULD BE WRITING THOUSANDS OF WORDS TO CONSIGN TO THE DUST AND THE DARK. THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK DEATH A FATE WORSE THAN BOREDOM.”

- The Last Samurai, Helen Dewitt.

“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power.”

-Philip K. Dick, How to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later.

“Do you understand what I’m trying to say? Rather than admire the mediocre great men over whom passersby nudge each other in awe, I venerate the young, unknown geniuses who die in their teens, their souls shattered delicate, phosphorescent glowworms that one must see to know they really did exist. That’s how I feel.”

Knut Hamsun – Mysteries

“The stiff blades of the grass pricked at my back through the thinnish material of my school uniform. Lifting the cigarette high in the air, my eyes half-closed, I gazed avidly at the smoke trailing in to the shadowy blue of the afternoon sky. It rose gracefully; it lingered, wavered in an almost imperceptible cloud; like a dream before waking, it took shape only, ineffectually, to dissolve again.”

- Yukio Mishima’s short story “Cigarette”, in the volume titled “Acts of Worship.”

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.” – Looking For Alaska

“If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…
If you’re a pretender come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!”

Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

No babe
We’d never
Swing together but
the syncopation
would be something wild
― Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters

To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must give up security. Therefore, to live one must be ready to die. How’s that for a paradox?

― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“No mistake – the turd is mankind’s real threat.”

-Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“it was decorated with a drastically color-saturated daytime photograph of the New York skyline, complete with the black towers of the World Trade Center.These were so intensely peculiar-looking, in retrospect, so monolithically sci-fi blank, unreal, that they now seemed to Milgrim to have been Photoshopped into every image he encountered them in.” spook country WIlliam Gibson

“Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.”
- Buckminster Fuller
Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects of Humanity (1969)

“He can run faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo.”

‘Lennie said softly, “I di’n’t forget, you bet, God damn. Hide in the brush an’
wait for George.” He pulled his hat down low over his eyes. “George gonna
give me hell,” he said. “George gonna wish he was alone an’ not have me
botherin’ him.” He turned his head and looked at the bright mountain tops. “I
can go right off there an’ find a cave,” he said. And he continued sadly, “—an’
never have no ketchup—but I won’t care. If George don’t want me . . . . I’ll go
away. I’ll go away.”’

Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

“You’re not Dostoevsky,’ said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev.

Well, who knows, who knows,’ he replied.
‘Dostoevsky’s dead,’ said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.
‘I protest!’ Behemoth exclaimed hotly. ‘Dostoevsky is immortal!”

― Mikhail Bulgakov, “The Master & Margarita”

“It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.”
Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig

“Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they’re preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them.”

-The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald

“Here’s what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara. “Everybody’s
born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that
thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person
from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But
sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it
shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate
that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just
don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it
very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening very well.
They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really. So I get worked
up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.”
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

“I remember in no particular order…” Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending

“The Edge…There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels

“When you own nothing, it’s easy to let things go.”
-Jerry Spinelli

“People like you to be something, preferably what they are.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“What vain weathercocks we are!” – Emily Bronte, “Wuthering Heights”

“No sooner had one season slipped out the door than the next came in by another door. A person might scramble to the closing door and call out, Hey, wait a minute, there’s one last thing that I forgot to tell you. But nobody would be there any more. The door shuts tight. Already another season is in the room, sitting in a chair, striking a match to light a cigarette. Anything you forgot to mention, the stranger says, you might as well go ahead and tell me, and if it works out, I’ll get the message through. Nah, it’s okay, you say, it was nothing really. And all around, the sound of the wind. Nothing, really. A season’s died, that’s all.”

—Haruki Murakami, “Pinball, 1973″

Tim O’Brien:

“Insight, vision. What you remember is determined by what you see, and what you see depends on what you remember. A cycle that has to be broken. And this requires a fierce concentration on the process itself: Focus on the order of things, sort out the flow of events so as to understand how one thing led to another, search for the point at which what happened had been extended into a vision of what might have happened. Where was the fulcrum? Where did it tilt from fact to imagination?”

– Going After Cacciato

I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening to the meat, over which it had no control.
“So when people I like do something terrible,” I said, I just flense them and forgive them.”
“Flense?” he said. “What’s flense?”
“It’s what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board,” I said. “They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I can do that in my head to people–get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.”
“And that’s not true,” she said.
“We’re having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true,” I said. “That’s how to act at a party.”

-Vonnegut, Bluebeard

There is a time to recite poetry, and there is a time for fists. Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives)

Once Dostoevsky had a clogged nostril. Blew through – broke a membrane in the ear. Plugged that with a cork – it turned out to be too big and fractured his skull… So he tied it with a string – realised that the mouth doesn’t open anymore. Suddenly he woke up in disbelief, God rest his soul.
- Daniil Kharms -

“you’re only a rebel from the waist downwards.”
-George Orwell, 1984

‘Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody’

- J.D. Salinger

R.I.P. E. Michael Mitchell

I thought to go with Kerouac’s firecracker line about the ones that really burn to live. I thought to go with Thompson’s opening screed in Fear and Loathing. Instead you get an ode to a future these books will never share in my well-used possession:

“Much as I love old, used books, there is something undeniably special about an old, pristine book. Though its dust jacket may be unwrinkled there is a certain dull shimmer off its smooth, unpimpled
surface that is quite unlike a copy fresh from the publisher’s case. Its crisp jacket is buffed to high gloss as its myriad fellows are plucked from the shelves year after year. You may know nothing of the paper mill pulp processes, filtration screen densities, flax, cotton, hay, birch, pine, preconsumer, postconsumer, virginal, harlot goddess timber content of that paper in your hands, but the grip, the grain, they will speak even to strangers. A beautiful,
uncracked volume from a century past lays heavy in your hands, yet IT holds you.

It calls to you from between the covers where it has been waiting oh so long. It wasn’t ready for all those years, but now, now it knows that you – italically perched on the tips of your Y? O! U’s, You are the one to share its secrets. You’ve seen other copies before, but they could have held anything inside. Over two hundred million copies of A Tale of Two Cities have been sold, but for all you know they’re full of random jottings and ink blottings of incoherent drivel except for the slim, spare red volume before you. A ‘Fine’ copy of Dickens capital T tale hasn’t been on the market in years, but you could trade it straight away for a house if you knew which side your bread was buttered.”

“O how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all, but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.”

-Hermann Hesse, “Narcissus and Goldmund”

‘The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.’ – Jack London, White Fang 1906

“They have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.”
Catch-22, Joseph Heller

“Despite the fact that they would always completely ignore me whenever we went on our walks together, they couldn’t just go and have a walk without me. This revealed a profoundly philosophical bent in these dogs which were not mine, because they had worked out that I had to be there in order for them to be able to ignore me properly. You can’t ignore someone who isn’t there, because that’s not what ‘ignore’ means.”

- Douglas Adams, “Maggie and Trudie”

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that.”

“Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know-because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and gives them wings as angels of persuasion and command.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the essay “Nature.”

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body… . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. – walt whitman; leaves of grass

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone’s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone’s hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don’t really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn’t have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER, “EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE”

Not a quote from a book, but a poet nonetheless:
‘And clenching your fist for the ones like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty”
Leonard Cohen, Chelsea hotel number 2

I come here for design. It happens every time the subject strays beyond fonts and layout software. (“Obscure references … trying to impress each other… please, can we start talking some sense?”) In these cases, our visitors react like diners who just got served penne alla vodka in a Mexican restaurant: it’s not the kind of dish they came for, and they doubt the proprietors have the expertise to serve it up….

[T]he great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can’t get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you’re interested in, the better your work will be.

” I have feet the size of boats”
- The Princess Diaries

“Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Withen 5 minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, “What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” And it was then Cecelia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: “Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a 13 year old girl.” The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

“In spite of wars and tourism and pictures by satellite, the world is just the same size as it ever was. It is awesome to think how much of it I will never see. It is no trick to go round the world these days; you can pay a lot of money and fly round it nonstop in less that forty eight hours, but to know it, to smell it and feel it between your toes you have to crawl. There is no other way. Not flying, not floating. You have to stay on the ground and swallow the bugs as you go. Then the world is immense.”—Ted Simon (from his book Jupiter’s Travels)

Gimme hate, Lord,” he whimpered. “I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it…It’s too heavy. Jesus, you know, You know all about it. Ain’t it heavy? Jesus? Ain’t love heavy?”

-Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“I’m a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while.
I’m a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I’ve been
in jail more than once and I don’t do divorce business. I like liquor
and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don’t like me too
well, but I know a couple I get along with. I’m a native son, born in
Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get
knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to
anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out
of his or her life.”

― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“I was anti-everything and everyone. I didn’t want people around me. This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety; merely a mature recognition of my own psychological vulnerability and my lack of suitability as a companion. Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as i struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life.”

― Irvine Welsh, The Acid House

Narrator: You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time. You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”-James Joyce, The Dead

“Most of what happens in our lives takes place in our absence: but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so that everything is in my head, down to the last detail, such as the way the mist seemed to slant across the early morning air… everything, and not just the few clues one stumbles across, for instance by opening an old tin trunk which should have remained cobwebby and closed.”
-Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” – Albus Dumbledore

”I have known those abortions of the
spirit, the awareness of the failures, the knowledge of the times
when the spirit falls into darkness, is lost. These have been the
daily bread of my days, my constant obsessional quest for the
irretrievable.”
Anais Nin – Je Suis le Plus Malade des Surrealistes

“stealing is luxury” –
Blood & Guts in High School by Kathy Acker

Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid, or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality
there is.
Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

“I want others to go out in the world with an idea, with intentions and means, and come back with a story about how their actions affected the world and how they themselves were shaped by the results.”—You Shall Know Our Velocity, by Dave Eggers

“Will Mr. Dr. Doctor help when you have the baby?” asks Freddie.
“He will be there if he can,” says Mrs. Dr. Doctor. “But only just like any other father”.
- Richard Scarry, Dr. Doctor

“All god does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.” – Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die. ” – Hunter s Thompson, Fear and loathing in Las Vagas

can i post an image (or two) as my passage? My favourite book is a graphic novel/comic/thing haha.

“Jean-Marc used to say that bread may not always turn out the way you intend it to, but it always turns out.”

Judith Ryan Hendricks, “Bread Alone”

“The roof collapsed, sending down a fresh avalanche of wood and nails, tarpaper and shingles and insulation. There was the sky, filled with flat-topped clouds, cruising like a fleet of anvils across the blue. George had the watery, raw feeling of being outdoors when you are sick. The clouds halted, paused for an instant, and plummeted onto his head. The very blue of the sky followed, draining from the heights into that cluttered concrete socket. Next fell the stars, tinkling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally, the black vastation itself came untacked and draped over the entire heap, covering George’s confused obliteration.”

– Paul Harding, Tinkers

Yeah, I know, I know. It’s horrible, it’s cheap and small. And worse, I drew a picture of her on her deathbed.
- Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked what kind of music he would like played at the hanging. He said he’d have to think about it but it would take him a while to decide.”

―Donald Barthelme, Forty Stories

“I am haunted by humans.”

– Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”

― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering
it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost,
like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece
of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden
eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.” – Jack Kerouac “The Dharma Bums”

“Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home.”- Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett “Good Omens.”

“Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.
If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: it can be done.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Breakfast of Champions

“I have found that everything, no matter how bad, comes to an end.”
-The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay

“Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: “They are gazing at God’s windows.” A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks.”
– Milan Kundera, Slowness

“I must read.
I must read.
I must read.”

-Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

”We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will” Chuck Palahniuk – Diary, a novel

“One must always be careful of books,” said Tessa, “and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”

—
Cassandra Clare
(Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, #1))

“I do not believe that men were meant for games, that that is their highest purpose. Work is nobler than play. I believe that men were meant for work, that their highest calling is to build, not destroy or even protect. Learning to fight, trying to embody the virtues of the hunter and warrior – these things are useful and important, even essential. But don’t be content with being a warrior, be a builder as well. Make something. The true calling of man, real manhood, is about creation, not destruction, and everyone secretly knows it.”

A Fighter’s Heart – Sam Sheridan

“It had been a bad night, and when he tried to drive home he had a terrible argument with his car.”
-Philip K. Dick, “The Game-Players of Titan”

“On the wall to the left of the desk were three very small shelves,
and on them were science primers and school books from which Rebekah had
taught and most of which she had bought with the money her mother gave
her for herself for drying peaches when she was a child. They were all
now very old. What she felt for them was what no one feels for the books
out of which they have been taught by another—it was what a full grown
doe might feel for a little mountain stream, which it had found for itself when it
was a very young fawn wandering quite alone and parched with thirst,
and from which it had drunk. It might have tasted of many finer clearer
streams since then, but in none of them all would the water be to it
like that in the little stream it found all for itself when it was a
small thing, quite alone, and dying of thirst.”
— Olive Schreiner, “From Man to Man”

“When He aim for something to be always a-moving, he makes it long ways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, but when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man.”
-William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“I guess I could go to Hawaii.” – The Motel Life

The Way of the Samurai is found in death. When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not
particularly difficult. Be determined and advance. To say that
dying without reaching one’s aim is to die a dog’s death is the
frivolous way of sophisticates. When pressed with the choice of
life or death, it is not necessary to gain one’s aim.

We all want to live. And in large part we make our logic
according to what we like. But not having attained our aim
and continuing to live is cowardice. This is a thin dangerous
line. To die without gaming one’s aim is a dog’s death and
fanaticism. But there is no shame in this. This is the substance
of the Way of the Samurai. If by setting one’s heart right every
morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were
already dead, he pains freedom in the Way. His whole life will
be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.

Hagakure (Hidden Leaves) by Yamamoto Tsunetomo

“Scheisse!” Dummling!” Franz yelled. “What’s in that woolly head of yours? I know it’s not a brain!”
-Marcus Samuelsson, Yes, Chef a memoir

“…they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men.”

Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“And suddenly the thought comes to you in a flash: what if this is not because of the fear, but the fear is because of this.”

- Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where –”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland

“silence, I discover, is something that you actually hear”
H. Murakami “Kafka on the Shore”

it’s so ordinary… but this could be a moment of miraculous hapiness…
-solanin

“Bumi revolusi masih luas. Bumi jajahan terlampau sempit. Semua orang penting di bumi penjajahan ini tidak bakal lebih dari kau! Juga kolonelmu sendiri lebih hina dari kau yang paling tinggi kedudukannya.”

— Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Larasati

“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
Frederich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

I’m not sure what one human being
can do. I’ve never pushed myself to the limit. I thought I had, but I realize now I hadn’t. My self-tests were always carefully non-destructive.

“I don’t know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”

-J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”
e.a.poe poems

“But I have my life, I’m living it. It’s twisted, exhausting, uncertain, and full of guilt, but nonetheless, there’s something there.”

– Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake

“The fact that the ruins receive us warmly and kindly after all, and that they attract us with their cracks and flaking surfaces, could this not really be a sign of the material taking revenge, having recaptured its original life?”
- Gutai Manifesto

“What had he to live for? What had he to look forward to? Why should he strive? To live in order to exist? Why, he had been ready a thousand times before to give up existence for the sake of an idea, for a hope, even for a fancy. Mere existence had always been too little for him”

-Fydor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“In the New Poland, the truths were separated from the untruths by decibels. The untruths were now proclaimed loudly with a brass band, relentless marching and waving banners. Toward the Bright Future. All Power to the Workers. Life Has Become Better, Comrades; Life Has Become More Cheerful. The Soviets Will Keep You Warm. Meanwhile , everything real was whispered, passed softly and meticulously from one person to the next. And so it would be for the next fifty years. The quietest sounds would be the most important ones.”

-A Long Long Time Ago and Essentially True- Brigid Pasulka

“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there, leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” – J.D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew

“I walked up to the microphone, gulping and trying to think of something to sing about. I was a little blank in the head or something, and no matter how dam hard I tried, I just couldn’t think up any kind of song to sing-just empty…”

– Woody Guthrie: Bound for Glory

“Aomame visited several little rooms she possessed inside her, tracing time backwards the way a small fish swims upstream. She found there familiar sights and long-forgotten smells, gentle nostalgia and severe pain. Suddenly, from some unknown source, a narrow beam of light pierced Aomame’s body. She felt as though, mysteriously, she had become transparent. When she held her hand up in the beam, she could see through it. Suddenly there was no weight in her body. At this moment Aomame thought, “even if I give myself over to madness-or prejudice- here and now, even if doing so destroys me, even if this world vanishes in its entirety, what do I have to loose?” ” -1Q84, Haruki Murakami

It’s more of an epic poem, but…

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”

-Carl Sandburg; The People, Yes

“I wanna dedicate this book to my penis” Mark Wahlberg, MarkyMark Memoir

“A ragged line of sparrows sat on electrical line, constantly switching positions like musical notes being rewritten.”

-Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.”
“What I like doing best is Nothing.”
“How do you do Nothing,” asked Pooh after he had wondered for a long time.
“Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, ‘What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?’ and you say, ‘Oh, Nothing,’ and then you go and do it.
It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”
“Oh!” said Pooh.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

-James Baldwin “The Fire Next Time”

“It was one of those perfect autumn days so common in stories and so rare in the real world.”

- The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss

“A black pig is like a tormented bat. Both the pig and the bat feel pain and anguish but they can not understand, they cannot know the true meaning or point of it.”

Racter, The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed

“If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller’s felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.”

- Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“He is gone on the mountain,
He is lost to the forest,
Like a summer-dried fountain,
When our need was the sorest.
The font, reappearing,
From the rain-drops shall borrow,
But to us comes no cheering,
To Duncan no morrow!
The hand of the reaper
Takes the ears that are hoary,
But the voice of the weeper
Wails manhood in glory.
The autumn winds rushing
Waft the leaves that are searest,
But our flower was in flushing,
When blighting was nearest.”

- Sir Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake

“But then Jonathan said it was something he must do, even if it was
dangerous. ‘Why?’ I wondered. ‘Otherwise you’re not a human being but
just a piece of dirt’ said Jonathan.”

Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren

And the Grinch, with his grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow,
Stood puzzling and puzzling: “How could it be so?
“It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
“It came without packages, boxes or bags!”
And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before!
“Maybe Christmas”, he thought, “doesn’t come from a store.
“Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!”

How the Grinch Stole Christmas, by Dr. Seuss

‘Au revoir, Giovanni.’

‘Au revoir, mon cher.’

I turned from him, unlocked the door. The weary exhale of his breath seemed to ruffle my hair and brush my brow like the very wind of madness. I walked down the short corridor, expecting every instant to hear his voice behind me, passed through the vestibule, passed the loge of the still sleeping concierge, into the morning streets. And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty –or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound.

I thought only, One day I’ll weep for this. One of these days I’ll start to cry.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

Woohoo! A book giveaway, my life couldn’t be better, it wouldn’t hurt to try.

“Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.” -Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Let the wild rumpus start!”
-Maurice Sendak, Where The Wild Things Are

“Nothing more exhilarating (he wrote) than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.” -Junot Diaz, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.”
-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.”

- Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

‘Love him,’ said Jaques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last? since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they WILL be dirty–they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better–forever–if you will NOT be ashamed, if you will only NOT play it safe.’

- James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Whatever I said, it went in her hear and out her mouth.

I taught her to point and call out the five elements that make up the physical world; metal, wood, water, fire, earth.

I taught her what makes the world a living place; sunrise and sunset, heat and cold, dust and heat, dust and wind, dust and rain.

I taugher her what is worth listening to in this world: wind, thunder, horses galloping in the dust, pebbles falling in water. I taught her what is frightening to hear: fast footsteps at night, soft cloth slowly ripping, dogs barking, the silence of crickets.

I taught her the five tastes that give us memories of life: sweet, sour, bitter, pungent and salty.”

~Amy Tan, 100 Secret Senses.

“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spend my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer.

“The ‘language of beauty’ is ‘the language of a timeless reality.’ To create a beautiful object ‘is to link time and eternity’ in such a way as to redeem us from time’s tyranny.”

David Harvey “The Condition of Postmodernity”

I don’t get it.
- Robert Crumb

“There was a horrible sound. The skin of his forehead distended as we yanked his head back. It stretched and distended until a sort of shelf of stretched forehead-flesh half a meter long extended from his head to the window. The sound was like some sort of elastic from hell. The dermis of Stice’s forehead was still stuck fast, but the abundant loose flesh of Stice’s bulldog face had risen and gathered to stretch and connect his head to the window. And for a second I saw what might be considered Stice’s real face, his features as they would be if not encased in loose jowly prairie flesh: as every mm. of spare flesh was pulled up to his forehead and stretched, I got a glimpse of Stice as he would appear after a radical face-lift: a narrow, fine-featured, and slightly rodential face, aflame with some sort of revelation, looked out at the window from beneath the visor of stretched spare skin.”

-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

“Hug me till you drug me, honey. Kiss me till I’m in a coma”

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.”

― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“They are coming to teach us good manners! But they won’t succeed, because we are gods.”

-Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; The Leopard

“They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

The Rioting had escalated over night and school was cancelled by midday.
“David Choe” by David Choe

“I was gifted, am gifted. Sometimes I looked at my hands and realized that I could have been a great pianist or something. But what have my hands done? Scratched my balls, written checks, tied shoes, pushed toilet levers, etc. I have wasted my hands. And my mind.”
Charles Bukowski / Pulp

I dust a bit…in addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

~Ignatius J. Reilly”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

From To Kill A Mockingbird:You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

“I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how
free I am, but I can’t really understand what it means. All I know is
I’m totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary
explorer who’s lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be
free? I don’t know, and I give up thinking about it.”

-Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert,

the mountains on the sudden skyline
stark
and black
and livid

like a land of some other order out there
whose true geology was not stone
but fear.

- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

-Carl Sagan (Cosmos)

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they
know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a
general thing.”

- Robert E. Howard

“The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering.”

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

“It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is
terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?”

-The Secret History by Donna Tartt

“You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It’s not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can’t even remember your name.”

– Lenora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“She was made after the time of ribs and mud. By papal decree
there were to be no more people born of the ground or from the marrow of bones. All would be created from the propulsions and mounts performed underneath bedsheets- rare exception granted for immaculate conceptions. The mixing pits were sledged and the cutting tables, where ribs were extracted from pigs and goats, were sawed in half. Although the monks were devout and obedient to the thunder of Rome, the wool of their robes was soaked not only by the salt of sweat but also by that of tears. The monks rolled down their heavy sleeves, hid their slaughter knives inthe burlap of their scrips, and wiped the hoes clean. They closed the factory down, chained the doors with Vatican-crested locks, and marched off in holy formation. Three lines, their faces staring down in humility, closing their eyes when walking over puddles, avoiding their unshaven reflections. ”

- Salvador Plascencia from “The People of Paper”

“He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats… spoke of her as el marwhich is masculine. They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought”

- Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea.

“With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”

- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

cunt.fuck.bastard.shite.-Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”

– Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

“Paint like a fiend when the idea possesses you”

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

That have the expanse of infinite things,
Like ambergris, musk, balsam and incense,
Which sing the ecstasies of the mind and senses.

-baudeleire

“I again had the sensations of being tossed, spinning, and falling down at a tremendous speed. Then I exploded. I disintegrated. Something in me gave out; it released something I had kept locked up all my life…There was no longer the sweet unity I call ‘me’. There was nothing and yet that nothing was filled. It was not light or darkness, hot or cold, pleasant or unpleasant. It was not that I moved or floated or was stationary, neither was I a single unit, a self, as I am accustomed to being. I was a myriad of selves which were all ‘me’, a colony of separate units that had a special allegiance to one another…”

Carlos Castaneda – ‘Tales of Power’

“I again had the sensations of being tossed, spinning, and falling down
at a tremendous speed. Then I exploded. I disintegrated. Something in me
gave out; it released something I had kept locked up all my
life…There was no longer the sweet unity I call ‘me’. There was
nothing and yet that nothing was filled. It was not light or darkness,
hot or cold, pleasant or unpleasant. It was not that I moved or floated
or was stationary, neither was I a single unit, a self, as I am
accustomed to being. I was a myriad of selves which were all ‘me’, a
colony of separate units that had a special allegiance to one
another…”

Carlos Castaneda – ‘Tales of Power’

“…I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”

― J.D. Salinger – Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters

“Knowledge is power. Guard it well.”

-From The Blood Ravens omnibus (Warhammer, 40K)

«Mais, je vous en supplie, ne soulignez ni du crayon, ni trop de la penseé».

Translation: “But I beg you, don’t underline (that) with pencil nor with too much thought”

- Arthur Rimbaud, Letter to Georges Izambard, 1871.

“Make your choice, adventurous stranger,
strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, til it drives you mad,
what would have followed if you had”

-C.S. Lewis, The Magicians Nephew.

“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

” In all likelihood my true subject may prove to be simply the wind— its changing nature, its rough and whispering characteristics, the various spices of the world which it brings together suddenly in hot or freezing gusts to alter the flavor of our in- most recollections of pleasure or pain—simply that wind to which my heart and also my skin have always been especially sensitive.” —John Hawkes, Second Skin