| Long, but so worth the read |
[Dec. 17th, 2009|09:14 pm] |
"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.
I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.
I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.
I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.
I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.
I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.
I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.
I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.
I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.
I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."
American Gods, Neil Gaiman |
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| "Foreigner" by C. J. Cherryh |
[Dec. 17th, 2009|10:32 pm] |
Maybe the assassin wouldn't spend a plane ticket on him.
Maybe boredom would send the rascal back to livelier climes.
Maybe after a week of this splendid luxury he would hike to the train station and join the assassin in an escape himself.
Fancies, all.
(I don't know if I've posted this one before because I like to reread this book a lot - it's just so good!)
And his head began to feel light and strange. Is this dying? he wondered. Am I dying? Banichi's going to be mad if that's the case.
If you haven't read this book, let alone the series, you need to. She has an AMAZINGLY hilarious writing style, and the story is fun, and the characters are fun, and if you like political science and "aliens" it's fun, and if you like diversity theories, outer space, psychology... it's a fun series, all around :D. |
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| The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins |
[Dec. 17th, 2009|08:07 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  amused | ] |
Oh, my young friends and fellow-sinners! beware of presuming to exercise your poor carnal reason. Oh, be morally tidy! Let your faith be as your stockings, and your stockings as your faith. Both ever spotless, and both ready to put on at a moment's notice! |
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| Request: Friendship Quotes |
[Dec. 17th, 2009|08:29 pm] |
I was wondering if anyone knew really good friendship quotes, sayings,ect...?
Thank You in advance. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 17th, 2009|04:21 am] |
♥ Yesterday was Constance's birthday party. Arrived about an hour late and made my way through Magda's house, following the sound of screaming into the garden where a scene of unbridled carnage was under way with adults chasing after children, children chasing rabbits and, in the corner, a little fence behind which were two rabbits, a gerbil, an ill-looking sheep and a pot-bellied pig.
♥ Rebecca looked as though she had eaten a tiramisù and only just checked the fat units.
♥ Thank God have got cappuccino to help self through aftermath of hell of buying cappuccino when late. Is bizarre how cappuccino queue thing gives whole areas of London appearance of war- or communism-torn culture with people standing patiently in huge queues for hours as if waiting for bread in Sarajevo while others sweat, roasting and grinding, banging metal things full of gunge around, with steam hissing.
♥ Bloody, bloody, bloody. Have spent all day in changing rooms of Oxford Street trying to squeeze my breasts into bikini tops designed for people with breasts either arranged one on top of the other in the center of their chests or one under each arm, with the harsh downlighting making me look like River Café frittata.
♥ Arrived v. late owing to typical motorway signpost debacle (if war today, better, surely, to confuse Germans by leaving signposts up?).
♥ Very black. All my life I have had the feeling something terrible was about to happen and now it has.
♥ Was completely overcome. Was the best present I had ever had in life.
"Thank you, thank you, I can't thank you enough," I said emotionally, on the verge of flinging my arms round him, and taking him roughly against the bars.
~~Bridget Jones the Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding. |
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| John Steinbeck - Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|10:25 pm] |
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"I am choosing to write this book to my sons. They are little boys now and they will never know what they came from through me, unless I tell them. It is not written for them to read now but when they are grown and the pains and joys have tousled them a little. And if the book is addressed to them, it is for a good reason. I want them to know how it was, I want to tell them directly, and perhaps by speaking directly to them I shall speak directly to other people. One can go off into fanciness if one writes to a huge nebulous group but I think it will be necessary to speak very straight and clearly and simply if I address my book to my two little boys who will be men before they read my book. They have no background in the world of literature, they don't know the great stories of the world as we do. And so I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all - the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness. I shall try to demonstrate to them how these doubles are inseparable - how neither can exist without the other and how out of their groupings creativeness is born. I shall tell them this story against the background of the county I grew up in and along the river I know and do not love very much. For I have discovered that there are other rivers. And this my boys will not know for a long time nor can they be told. A great many never come to know that there are other rivers. Perhaps that knowledge is saved for maturity and very few people ever mature. It is enough if they flower and reseed. That is all that nature requires of them. But sometimes in a man or a woman awareness takes place - not very often and always inexplainable. There are no words for it because there is no one ever to tell. This is a secret not kept a secret, but locked in wordlessness. In utter loneliness the writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through - not ever very much. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can't be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible. There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights. And giving up the impossible he gives up writing. Whether fortunate or unfortunate, this has not happened to me. The same blind effort, the straining and puffing go on in me. And always I hope that a little trickles through. This urge dies hard." |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|11:27 pm] |
"Someone just dumped a whole garbage can of orange peels out the window."
Teddy took in most of his head [from the window]. "They float very nicely," he said without turning around. "That's interesting.
"I don't mean it's interesting that they float.It's interesting that I know about them being there. If i hadn't seen them, then I wouldn't know they were there, and if i didn't know they were there, I wouldn't be able to say that they even exist.
"Some of them are starting to sink now. In a few minutes, the only place they'll still be floating will be inside my mind. That's quite interesting, because if you look at it a certain way, that's where they started floating in the first place.
"After i go out this door, I may only exist in the minds off all my acquaintances," he said. "I may be an orange peel."
--------
Teddy, Nine Stories, Salinger.
sorry if this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. this conversation about the orange peels goes on between other conversations for a few pages! |
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| if nobody speaks of remarkable things by jon mcgregor |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|08:59 pm] |
"All the emails I get these days start with but I've been so busy, and I don't understand how we can be so busy and then have nothing to say to each other."
"He was talking quite slowly, breathlessly, he said and the worst thing was, it was strange, the worse thing, more than the fear of what might happen to me, what they might do or how I might get out of it, the worst thing was thinking that nobody would ever know, that I would just be missing, disappeared, vanished.
He looked at me and he said can you imagine that?
He said can you imagine anything more lonely?" |
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| The Mysteries of Pittsburgh - Michael Chabon |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|07:15 pm] |
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When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness - and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 17th, 2009|10:07 am] |
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
Albert Camus |
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| white oleander, janet fitch |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|06:48 pm] |
Yvonne shook me awake. She took my head in her lap, and her long brown hair draped over us like a shawl. Her belly was warm and firm as a bolster. Through the strands of her hair wove the colored strands of light I still saw, cast by a kid's carousel bedside lamp I'd scavenged on trash day. "We get all the bad dreams, ese," she said, stroking my wet cheek with the palm of her hand. "We got to leave some for somebody else." |
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| the opening to LIGHT YEARS by James Salter |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|04:39 pm] |
One WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back.
The day is white as paper. The windows are chilled. The quarries lie empty, the silver mine drowned. The Hudson is vast here, vast and unmoving. A dark country, a country of sturgeon and carp. In the fall it was silver with shad. The geese flew overhead in their long, shifting V's. The tide flows in from the sea.
The Indians sought, they say, a river that "ran both ways." Here they found it. The salt wedge penetrates as far in as fifty miles; sometimes it reaches Poughkeepsie. There were huge beds of oysters here, seals in the harbor, in the woods inexhaustible game. This great glacial cut with its nuptial bays, the coves of wild celery and rice, this majestic river. The birds, like punctuation, are crossing in level flight. They seem to approach slowly, accelerate, pass overhead like arrows. The sky has no color. A feeling of rain.
All this was Dutch. Then, like so much else, it was English. The river is a reflection. It bears only silence, a glittering cold. The trees are naked. The eels sleep. The channel is deep enough for ocean liners; they could, if they wished, astonish the inner towns. There are turtles and crabsin the marshes, herons, Bonaparte gulls. The sewage pours from the cities further up. The river is filthy, but cleanses itself. The fish are numbed; they drift with the tide.
Along the banks there are houses of stone, no longer fashionable, and wooden houses, drafty and bare. There are still estates that exist, remnants of the great land parcels of the past. Near the water, a large Victorian, the brick painted white, trees high above it, a walled garden, a decaying greenhouse with ironwork along the roof. A house by the river, too low for the afternoon sun. It was flooded instead with the light of morning, with the eastern light. It was in glory at noon. There are spots where the paint has turned dark, bare spots. The gravel paths are dissolving; birds nest in the sheds.
We strolled in the garden, eating the small, bitter apples. The trees were dry and gnarled. The lights in the kitchen were on.
A car comes up the driveway, back from the city. The driver goes inside, only for a moment until he's heard the news: the pony has gotten loose.
He is furious. "Where is she? Who left the door unlatched?"
"Oh God, Viri. I don't know."
In a room with many plants, a kind of solarium, there is a lizard, a brown snake, a box turtle asleep. The entry step is deep, the turtle cannot leave. He sleeps on the gravel, his feet drawn up close. His nails are the color of ivory, they curl, they are long. The snake sleeps, the lizard sleeps.
Viri has his coat collar up and is trudging uphill. "Ursula!" he calls. He whistles.
The light has gone. The grass is dry; it creaks underfoot. There was no sun all day. Calling the pony's name, he advances toward the far corners, the road, the adjoining fields. A stillness everywhere. It begins to rain. He sees the one-eyed dog that belongs to a neighbor, a kind of husky, his muzzle gray. The eye is closed completely, sealed, covered with fur so long ago was it lost, as if it never existed.
"Ursula!" he cries.
"She's here," his wife says when he returns.
The pony is near the kitchen door, tranquil, dark, eating an apple. He touches her lips. She bites him absent-mindedly on the wrist. Her eyes are black, lustrous, with the long, crazy lashes of a drunken woman. Her coat is thick, her breath very sweet.
"Ursula," he says. Her ears turn slightly, then forget. "Where have you been? Who unlocked your stall?"
She has no interest in him.
"Have you learned to do that?" He touches an ear; it is warm, strong as a shoe. He leads her to the shed, whose door is ajar. Outside the kitchen he stamps dirt from his shoes.
The lights are on everywhere: a vast, illuminated house. Dead flies the size of beans lie behind the velvet curtains, the wallpaper has corner bulges, the window glass distorts. It is an aviary they live in, a honeycomb. The roofs are thick slate, the rooms are like shops. It gives off no sound, this house; in the darkness it is like a ship. Within, if one listens, there is everything: water, faint voices, the slow, measured rending of grain.
In the principal bath, with its stains, sponges, soaps the color of tea, books, water-curled copies of Vogue, he steams in peace. The water is above his knees; it penetrates to the bone. There is carpeting on the floor, a basket of smooth stones, an empty glass of the deepest blue.
"Papa," they call through the door.
"Yes." He is reading the Times.
"Where was Ursula?"
"Ursula?"
"Where was she?"
"I don't know," he says. "She went out for a walk."
They wait for something further. He is a storyteller, a man of wonders. They listen for sounds, expecting the door to open.
"But where was she?"
"Her legs were wet," he announces.
"Her legs?"
"I think she was swimming."
"No, Daddy, really."
"She was trying to get the onions on the bottom."
"There are no onions there."
"Oh, yes."
"There are?"
"That's where they grow."
They explain it to each other outside the door. It's true, they decide. They wait for him, two little girls squatting like beggars.
"Papa, come out," they say. "We want to talk to you."
He puts aside the paper and sinks one last time into the embrace of the bath.
"Papa?"
"Yes."
"Are you coming out?"
The pony fascinates them. It frightens them. They are ready to run if it makes an unexpected sound. Patient, silent, it stands in its stall; a grazing animal, it eats for hours. Its muzzle has a nimbus of fine hair, its teeth are browned.
"Their teeth never stop growing," the man who sold her to them said. He was a drunkard, his clothes were torn. "They keep growing out and getting wore down."
"What would happen if she didn't eat?"
"If she didn't eat?"
"What would happen to her teeth?"
"Make sure she eats," he said.
They often watch her; they listen to her jaws. This mythical beast, fragrant in the darkness, is greater than they are, stronger, more clever. They long to approach her, to win her love. |
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| The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|12:52 pm] |
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"And one has nothing and nobody, and one travels about the world with a trunk and a case of books and really without curiosity. What sort of a life is it really: without a house, without inherited things, without dogs? If only one had at least one's memories. But who has them? Were childhood there—it is as though buried. Perhaps one must be old to be able to reach all that. I think it must be good to be old."
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke (1910) |
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| In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W.H. Auden |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|12:25 pm] |
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress; |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 17th, 2009|01:16 am] |
I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mirror--- and me. The true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts. It is true that I had realized a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But until then I believed that it had simply gone out of my range. For me the past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state if vacation and inaction; each even, when it had played its part, put itself politely into a box and became an honorary event: we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be--- and behind them… there is nothing.
- Nausea, 130. Jean-Paul Sartre |
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| e.e. cummings |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|07:25 pm] |
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It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. –ee cummings |
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| Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|07:22 pm] |
"Each one of us has to be what he or she is".
"It is only by realizing what I am that I have found comfort of any kind".
"It is tragic how few people ever possess their souls before they die".
"I have hills far steeper to climb, valleys much darker to pass through. And I have to get it all out of myself. Neither religion, morality, nor reason can help me at all". |
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| Too cute. |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|02:57 am] |
♥ "... We could go dancing?"
I knew that was a stupid idea as soon as I said it. I danced like a donkey on Rollerblades and Rachel was even worse. The only thing she knew about rhythm was based on Dance Dance Revolution. And a girl who danced in a perfect square faster and faster just made everyone uncomfortable.
♥ I was as close to spontaneously combusting as you can get without being in the Fantastic Four.
♥ The apartments got smaller and smaller, and the parade of potential roommates started to resemble a Surreal Life highlight reel.
"I have my Wiccan sisterhood meetings here every full moon. That's why I have this goat."
"I have this lower intestine issue and I use a lot of toilet paper, but I barely use paper towels. So it evens out."
"I cook with curry."
♥ "... I thought about forking myself in the eye it was so boring. But then I remembered that I forgot to bring any extra contacts to New York, so I can't really fuck this pair up. Remind me to ask the parentals to send up more next time they call, 'kay?..."
♥ So okay, I was lost, but maybe I could pick up some sweet outfits anyway? As Rachel always says, if life gives you lemons... stick them down your shirt and make your boobs look bigger!
♥ He leaned into my cubicle, his gut cascading over the fabric-covered fiberglass wall that separated my cube from the mail cubbies. "Because I remember when I was your age. I used to party all the time." When he said "party", he kind of shimmied, which I assumed indicated that back in his day "partying" actually meant grotesquely fat men moving their shoulders.
~~Hot Mess, Summer in the City by Julie Kraut & Shallon Lester. |
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| from A Marriage Poem, Ellen Bryant Voigt |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|12:55 pm] |
This is what is done with pain:
ice on the wound,
the isolating tourniquet--
as though to check an open vein
where the self pumps out of the self
would stop the second movement of the heart,
diastolic, inclusive:
to love is to siphon love into that chamber. |
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| The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real - Margery Williams |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|11:54 pm] |
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." |
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