The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
“
| — | From Murphy by Samuel Beckett (via thewildernessunderground) |
I’m obsessed with inventing stories for people I come across. An overwhelming curiosity makes me ask myself what their lives might be like. I want to know what they do, where they’re from, their names, what they’re thinking about at that moment, what they regret, what they hope for, whom they’ve loved, what they dream of … and if they happen to be women (especially youngish ones), then the urge becomes intense. How quickly you would want to see that one naked, admit it, and naked through to her heart.
“
| — | From The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton (via readeveryday) |
Can you be happy with the movies, and the ads, and the clothes in the stores, and the doctors, and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them.
“
| — | From Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (via decaying-organic-matter) |
I’m losing the appetite for strangers. Once I would have focused on the excitement, the hazard; now it’s the mess, the bother. Getting your clothes off gracefully, always such an impossibility; thinking up what to say afterward, without setting the echoes going in your head. Worse, the encounter with another set of particularities: the toenails, the ear holes, the nosehairs.
“
| — | From Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood |
What we share…may be a lot like a traffic accident, but we do share it. We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.
“
| — | From Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood |
It was a distress she’d not felt since childhood when somebody (she’d forgotten who) had taught her the trick of looking at infinity by putting two mirrors face to face, each staring into the other’s reflection. She’d been twelve, thirteen at most, and completely spooked by the idea of this emptiness echoing emptiness, back and forth, back and forth, until they reached the limits of light. For years after she’d remembered that moment, confronted with a physical representation of something her mind revolted at.
“
| — | From The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker |
Before life, the dream of life. Before the thing solid, the solid thing dreamt. And mind, dreaming or awake, knew justice, which was therefore as natural as matter, its absence in any exchange deserving of more than a fatalistic shrug. It merited a howl of outrage; and a passionate pursuit of why. If she wished to live beyond the impending holocaust it was to shout that shout. To find out what crime her species had committed against the universal mind that it should now be tottering on execution.
“
| — | From The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker |
I feel lighter, as if I’m shedding matter, losing molecules, calcium from my bones, cells from my blood; as if I’m shrinking, as if I’m filling with cold air, or gently falling snow.
“
| — | From Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood |
In his writing he’d sought a style that set the facts out as plainly as possible. No fancy footwork; no flights of vocabulary. His mentor in this was not a journalist at all but Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, a man so concerned to communicate his satire with clarity that he’d reputedly read his works aloud to his servants to be certain his style did not confound his substance.
“
| — | From The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker |
This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate the absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?
“
| — | From Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer |
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
“
| — | By David Foster Wallace (via tel0s) |
Your letters got sadder. Your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. It didn’t help. You said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over the river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you.
“
| — | From Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski (via freins) |
And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.
“
| — | From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (via larmoyante) |
I have always derived great comfort from William Shakespeare. After a depressing visit to the mirror or an unkind word from a girlfriend or an incredulous stare in the street, I say to myself: ‘Well. Shakespeare looked like shit.’ It works wonders.
“
| — | From Money by Martin Amis (via strangephenomena) |
