quote_from_a_book_i'm_reading squint "I whispered, Everything was sort of doubled. It was the same way you kiss both lips when you just kiss a single mouth" 020801 ... silentbob "I explain the same thing to everybody: It all seems pointless in light of the fact that we're all going to die eventually. Why do anything- why wash my hair, why read Moby Dick, why fall in love, why sit through six hours of Nicholas Nickleby, why care about American intervention in Central America, why spend time trying to get into the right schools, why dance to the music when all of us are slouching toward the same inevitable conclusion? The shortness of life, i keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when i think about the longness of death. When i look ahead, all i can see is my final demise. And they say, But maybe not for seventy or eighty years. And i say, Maybe you, but me, I'm already gone." 020802 ... squint thats silly, because my book is all about the possibility of immortality...n...stuff... but I honestly think your book (bobby) is more my type of book. haha. 020802 ... Freak well, im no longer reading the book but I thought this was a cool quote. "The curious cat may have died, but the curious human being may have set foot on the path to ultimate satisfaction, for in the dangerous exploration of the unknown lies the key to rare knowledge." another good quote from the same author was: "everyone professes to love good and hate evil, but in their actions their real preference emerges." -Piers Anthony 020802 ... silentbob dear squint, the book i quoted from was prozac nation. check it out. 020803 ... squint !!!!! i KNEW it! I thought, after i typed that "god that sounds like that prozac nation girl". goddamn, i'm proud of myself. I have the book and read it. Silly me. she sort of drew things out a bit for my liking. certainly got her point across, though, huh? 020803 ... IKC 56-80 "Now when tweedle beetles battle..." 020804 ... silentbob yeah im just barely getting into it and she expands hardcore on everything. it makes me wonder when shes going to get to the point. 020804 ... squint she never does. (and for quoting's sake: "he knew I was dead before I did.") 020804 ... squint i'm thinking her point is just to swim around in the misery and make you want to wring her neck. she gets that across, anyway. 020804 ... Beth "and everytime I breathe, I am reaqauinted with the fact that I am keeping myself alive longer despite the fact that I can never hold you again...the past is unreachable, the present is unbearable, and the future is hopeless...now THAT is pain" 020804 ... Aimee "....Sooner or later, the young medical student has to tell his blue-collar father that he wants to be a proctologist. 'Wait a minute, Vinny, lemme get this straight. I busted my nuts for twenty years tryin' to save enough money to put you through college and now you tell me you want to stick your finger up a guy's ass?!' 'Not finger, Dad. Hand!' 'Jesus'" 020804 ... eklektic "when i was a small boy i had a terrible dream. i dreamt i held in my arms the severed heads of my younger brother and sister. they were quick still, and must, with big fluttering eyes, and reddened cheeks, and so horrified was i that i could make no more of a sound than they could. the dream came true." anne rice's "vittorio:the vampire" 020804 ... Glory Box "Hot Dog! Imagine me surrounded all day by a bevy of beautiful bombshells!" - Archie from Riverdale. High Art. 020827 ... Arwyn The fires below awoke in anger, the red light blazed, and all the cavern was filled with a great glare and heat. Suddenly Sam saw Gollum's long hands draw upwards to his mouth; his white fangs gleamed, and then snapped as they bit. Frodo gave a cry, and there he was, fallen upon his knees at the chasm's edge. But Gollum, dancing like a mad thing, held aloft the ring, a finger still thrust within its circle, It shone now as if verily it was wrought of living fire. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 020827 ... devalis "The end of a man is knowledge but... he can't know whether that knowledge will save him or kill him" "Any act of pure perception is a feat" "If you're an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you beacuse it isn't real anyway." "...there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's globe...it's dirt makes grass grow. A diamond ain't a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-A-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind...it all depends on what you do with the dirt." "Is it possible that there are fellows are born outside of luck, good or bad, and luck, which is what about makes you and me what we are, doesn't have anything to do with them, for they are what they are from the time they first kick in the womb until the end. And if that is the case, then their life hostory is a process of discovering what they really are, and not, as for you and me, sons of luck, a process of becoming what luck makes us." "If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people." -All The King's Men Robert Penn Warren 020827 ... Gilraen (s.h.o.t.h) 'Here, my lad, I'll take that! I did not ask you to handle it,' he cried, turning sharply and seeing Pippin coming up the steps, slowly, as if he was bearing a great weight. He went down to meet him and hastily took the dark globe from the hobbit, wrapping it in the folds of his cloak. 'I will take care of this,' he said. 'It is not a thing, I guess, that Saruman would have chosen to cast away.' Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers J.R.R.Tolkien 030324 ... amy "velvety darkness" -the Neverending Story. (if only the world had such a wonderful imagination.) 030324 ... girlnamedlover [I guess my reasons for mainly keeping quiet boil down to this: Who would ever have believed me? But I am now too old to care. So if YOU dont, you can go to hell.] -Thomas Berger Little Big Man 030324 ... Piso Mojado the way it has to be is to know you exist even when you're not in pain joyce carol oates, 'man crazy' 030325 ... splinken "PLENTY OF CIGARETTES: Figure 3 per guest per hour, scattered about in small, sturdy containers in many places. Plenty of ashtrays, matches, and lighters." from: Esquire Party Book: for Entertaining Around the Clock by: the editors of Esquire with Scotty and Ronnie Welch 030325 ... thraxisp "Out of a given population of human beings only a fith at most will be men of fighting age." L. Sprague de Camp, "Divide and Rule" 030325 ... breathless He was raw and rich and throbbing with life. He was sweet blood after the kill. - blood_and_chocolate Annette Curtis Klause 030326 ... wish~ oh i've read Blood_and_Chocolate before. Some people set out to find other lovers; some do not. Some simply wait. And even those who do not pursue, do not wait, do not actually want someone new, still somehow end up finding them anyway. -A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity by Whitney_Otto 030327 ... minnesota_chris One of my advanced writing students this semester wrote a deeply felt, but rather generic, piece on the death of his father. Another student gently commented: "Jason, I'd like to come away with a better sense of who your father was, how he's different from my dad." Jason returned with a funny piece on a trip he took to the cabin with his seventy-three-year-old father. He never mentioned death, but gave us instead the details of packing the car, the blankets, "Barbie-doll pink, fuzzy like a bad crew cut." He gave us what his father wanted in the cooler: "Sauerkraut, pickles, loaf of bread, that blue container, a can of Carnation milk, jam, no not that jam, the other one." --Mary Rose O'Reilley, "Radical Presence" 030330 ... falling_alone "It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true." -The Picture of Dorian Gray 031015 ... blueroses ...so he asked his father, who told him,"the more blackness a woman has, the more beautiful she is". "but why?" asked Kunta. "some day," said Omoro, "you will understand." the third people... are those waiting to be born. -Roots. Haley. it is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both. -Charlotte's Web, E.B.White. 040226 ... egger . 040226 ... secret4185 "Meanwhile, Joy could hardly feel the cold. Listening to Dean was getting more and more like recieving muffled blows, let's say being hit over and over with a sofa pillow. It didn't hurt, it didn't raise bruises, and you could go on letting it happen for weeks, until you realized the experience was numbing, and probably meant to be numbing.... eventually you nodded just to have it stop." ~Jane Smiley; Moo 040227 ... mous "To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation" 040227 ... minnesota_chris the purpose of torture is torture -- 1984, by George Orwell 040611 ... Connecting..the.dots.. "Hearts that are united through the medium of sorrow will not me separated by the glory of happiness. Love that is cleansed by tears will remain eternally pure and beautiful" - The Nature of Love by Kahlil Gibran 040611 ... once again "WE DID WHAT WE COULD UNTIL WE COULDN'T" -Theif of Time Terry Prachett 040612 ... marked . 040628 ... shower singer "De toute évidence, Ron s'était rendu compte qu'il avait arriré des ennuis à Harry car il n'avait plus rappelé. Hermione Granger, son autre meilleure amie, n'avait pas essayé de l'appeler. Harry se doutait que Ron lui avait conseillé de ne pas lui téléphoner et c'était bien dommage." Will Ron ever learn?? 040628 ... pauln "Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had" 040628 ... forgot the name "Dumb ass. It sounds like a womanly idea to me. Die motherfuckers." 040628 ... pete referring to the experience of his parents telling the main character and his sister that they were splitting up, and didn't split up for six years...coming after the entire world leapt forward 22 years for 2 minutes and he was with another woman, married to her...speaking to his current fiance, says llyod simcoe: "i don't want to subject myself to that experience ever again" flashforward, robert j sawyer 040629 ... Syrope So lonely. A friend once described lonely by saying that if it were a color it would be wite. At first I was too busy being sick to be lonely; too wretched to miss anyone; too busy warding off the intrusive thoughts, fighting the feeling of numbness to be lonely. I didn't know that acute symptoms are the psyche's way of saying you are frightened, lonely, loveless, depressed. That's why you feel all this insanity, all this psychotic pain. You would rather make a hurricane in your head than experience one legitimate emotion--loss, fear, anger, sadness, anything. How can you cry and not feel anything?...I would run to my room to cry alone. I wasn't sobbing about one thing, one loss, one memory...It was existential crying. I was crying for the lost me. Who was I? How could I be anything if I didn't know who I was? This was depression...I had thought depression meant simply sadness. I didn't know one felt crazed, insane, dumb, dead, numb, enraged, hysterical, all at once. Depression is a killer. "All parents do that to some degree," she said. "But eventually it's up to the child to handle it." I slumped back in my chair, glaring at her. "How can I explain?" I said. "Children in families like mine...especially the girls. Everything was a threat to our survival. Don't touch the toast in the toaster or we'd be electrocuted. Don't swim right after eating or we'd drowwn. Don't use a public toilet or we'd die of some dread disease. I'm surprised I've lasted this long. I wanted to be sturdy and strong, but my mind was filled with a chorus of don'ts: don't do this, don't do that, watch out, don't fall, don't eat, don't live. How can you understand that?" "I understand it perfectly," Julie said, her composure cool, her eyes gazing at me steadily. "Thousands of other girls are raised up just like that and they don't end up on Six North. So what good is all this?" --I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can 041230 ... kolmenonder If while dreaming a man traverses paradise, that he receive a flower as proof of passage, And upon wakening, he find this flower in his hands... What is one to say? Samuel Coleridge 050410 ... Freak 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, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud. 050410 ... Freak its from The Life of Pi 050410 ... no reason "nobody becomes an artist unless they have to" white_oleander 050421 ... michael cunninghams "It is not her first memory (that seems to involve a snail crawling over the lip of a curb)..." "Clarissa's father, gentle almost to the point of translucence, loved seeing women in little black dresses." "She, Laura, likes to imagine (it's one of her most closely held secrets) that she has a touch of brilliance herself, just a hint of it, though she knows most people probably walk around with similar hopeful suspicions curled up like tiny fists inside them, never divulged." "It is like the first disinterested sigh a lover sends over the telephone wires, the sigh that signals the earliest beginning of the end." the hours 050421 ... once again A thing is not high if one can reach it; it is not great if one can reason about it; it is not deep if one can see its bottom... This spares man any attempt to reach, reason, or see. ~Ayn Rand The_Fountainhead 051122 ... syrope Many people feel like a one-night stand is something to be ashamed of or embarrassed by. I disagree. There are many ways to get to know someone, and myu personal favorite is seeing them naked in Happy Baby pose. I also feel it is important to have sex soon after meeting someone in order to find out if you have sexual chemistry together. Otherwise, you could wait two to three months after you start dating someone only to discover that your new boyfriend is bad in bed, or even worse, into anal beads and duct tape. ... I don't know what it is about accents that makes me want to get undressed and high five myself. My Horizontal Life: A collection of one-night stands by Chelsea Handler 060513 ... no reason quotes_from_a_book_i_just_finished And it made me feel better in some obscure way: imagining myself a hero, rushing fearlessly for the gun, instead of merely loitering in the bullet's path like the bystander which i so essentially am. I was uncommunicative, she said. She never knew what I was thinking. The way I looked at her sometimes, when I woke up in the morning, frightened her. -"the secret history" by donna tartt oh. this book. i don't know what to say. i wish, i wish. i hope. sigh...wow. 060513 ... Ouroboros quote_from_a_poem_i_reread_frequently in a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse ts eliot the love song of j alfred prufrock 060514 ... Syrope "I'm sure you must know this, Shuya...but loving someone always requires you to not love others." --Battle Royale 070207 ... pete "The total effect exceeded the sum of each appropriation of information: colonial regimes were trying to /define/ the constituents of a certain kind of society, even as they embedded that act of creation within a notion that society was a natural occurrence and the state a nonpartisan regulator and neutral observer. Self-conscious projects of collecting and organizing knowledge could be applied as a virtual package in different parts of different empires..." Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler "Between Metropole and Colony" in /Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World/ (Cooper and Stoler, eds.) 070208 ... z he took a duck in the face at two hundred fifty knots. - pattern recognition - william gibson 070208 ... Syrope Thank you, I hate you, I'm sorry Thank you because without your support, I wouldn't be here I wouldn't have stayed when things got hard I wouldn't have believed that I could find a life. Thank you for the way you know me, for being my best friend for what feels like forever, and for raising the bar so high that I don't know where to begin. Thank you for knowing to let go before things got ugly. On some level, you must've known that forcing me to fly would force you to fly too, to do the things you know you need. And maybe you even share the belief that our paths will join us together again, and for always. I hate you for not wanting it badly enough, for not believing we could do this together, for not following through. I hate that you didn't have the balls to take a chance, to explore this place that's filled with your dreams. I hate that you don't even seem to be doing the things that made you stay. I hate that the way you tell me how you feel almost always hurts, and that most of the time you just don't tell me at all. I hate that you are the only guy I can imagine loving, and you make letting go seem so easy, like it doesn't hurt at all, like you don't ever cry. I'm sorry I left the way I did, because of what it said to you: that I would always expect you to follow. I'm sorry I didn't see it like that. I thought paving the way would create an adventure that would change our lives. I'm sorry I didn't wait until you were ready, that I didn't think I could, so the decision didn't feel like yours. I'm sorry that it seemed like your opinion wasn't important, when nothing could be further from the truth. I'm sorry that I doubted our future, and made you doubt it too. I didn't know well enough myself to tell you all the things that needed to change, and why. We both thought we'd have more time, and then I left. I'll always be sorry for that. --"Other people's love letters" edited by Bill Shapiro 071212 ... . "Chapter One" 071212 what's it to you? who go blather from