| American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis |
[Jul. 17th, 2009|05:56 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  thoughtful | ] |
... there is an idea of Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behaviour must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be in flicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this - and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've commited - and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing....
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| in spite of everything // e. e. cummings |
[Jul. 17th, 2009|12:12 am] |
in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neating each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds
-before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were |
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| Super In The City by Daphne Uviller |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|10:19 pm] |
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"She wandered through the aisles of stationary stores the way some women hunted shoe stores: longingly, lovingly, and always leaving with something she didn't need but couldn't live without." |
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| 1830s |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|11:15 pm] |
I found these fashion plates at a local junk store and thought they were too cute!
( One more ) |
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| Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl |
[Jul. 17th, 2009|10:42 am] |
And thus when you met someone who listened, someone content to do nothing but, so overwhelming was the difference, you had the startling and quite lonely epiphany that everyone else, every person you'd encountered since the day you were born who'd supposedly listened, had really not been listening to you at all. They'd been subtly checking out their own reflection in the glass bureau a little to the west of your head, thinking what they had to do later that evening, or deciding that next, as soon as you shut up, they were going to tell that classic story about their bout of Bangladeshi beachside dysentery, thereby showcasing how worldly, how wild (not to mention how utterly enviable) a human being they were. |
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| a request... |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|06:16 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | pensive | ] |
this is my favorite quote of all time:
Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,--'Wait and hope'.
Dumas~ Count of Monte Cristo.
i was wondering if anyone wanted to help me out with a gift for my boyfriend and i wanted to give him a bracelet with a quote on it about always in my thoughts/heart, you're never alone. hell, a kick ass love quote would work. the quote sites don't have anything but the cliche` sayings. so does anyone have any favorite quotes about that (admittedly) vague subject? anything please? pretty please? I did see the quote from cumming's poem, which i thought was cool.
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| high fidelity. as usual. |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|08:52 pm] |
we sing a hymn, pray, there's a brief and unsatisfactory address from the vicar, some stuff from his book, and another hymn, and then there's this sudden, heart-stopping clanking of machinery and the coffin disappears slowly through the floor. and as it does so, there's a howl from in front of us, a terrible, terrible noise that i don't want to hear: i can only just tell that it's laura's voice, but i know that it is, and at that moment i want to go to her and offer to become a different person, to remove all trace of what is me, as long as she will let me look after her and try to make her feel better.
- high fidelity by nick hornby.
this breaks my heart every time i read it. |
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| Elegy for 41 Whales by Linda Bierds |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|08:49 pm] |
Beached in Florence Oregon, June 1979
“There was speculation that a parasite in the whales’ ears may have upset their equilibrium and caused them to become disoriented.” —UPI
In the warm rods of your ears
forty-one parasites hummed
and you came rolling in
like tarred pilings after a hurricane.
What songs were they piping for you?
What promises did you follow, past the coral
and mussels, and out from the frothy hem
of your world?
These are people.
They dance around you now like hooked marlin.
Some are weeping. Some are trying to pull you back.
Some crouch above your blow holes
and drill their cigarettes into your skin.
All night your teeth are clicking.
All along the beach you are clicking like wind chimes.
Is the song still piping for you?
This is sand. You cannot swim through it.
These are trees. Those houses on the cliff
are also trees. And the light that blinks
from them now is made from water.
We have a way of reworking the vital.
This is a pit. That was quicklime.
And here is fire. |
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| extremely loud and incredibly close - jonathan safran foer |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|07:06 pm] |
To my unborn child: I haven’t always been silent, I used to talk and talk and talk and talk, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, the silence overtook me like a cancer, it was one of my first meals in America, I tried to tell the waiter, “The way you just handed me that knife, that reminds me of -” but I couldn’t finish the sentence, her name wouldn’t come, I tried again, it wouldn’t come, she was locked inside me, how strange, I thought, how frustrating, how pathetic, how sad, I took a pen from my pocket and wrote “Anna” on my napkin, it happened again only two days later, and then again the following day, she was the only thing I wanted to talk about, it kept happening, when I didn’t have a pen, I’d write Anna in the air - backward and right to left - so that the person I was speaking with could see, and when I was on the phone I’d dial the numbers -2, 6, 6, 2 - so that the person could hear what I couldn’t, myself, say. “And” was the next word I lost, probably because it was so close to her name, what a simple word to say, what a profound word to lose, I had to say “ampersand,” which sounded ridiculous, but there it is, “I’d like a coffee ampersand something sweet,” nobody would choose to be like that. “Want” was a word I lost early on, which is not to say that I stopped wanting things -I wanted things more - I just stopped being able to express the want, so instead I said “desire”, “I desire two rolls,” I would tell the baker, but that wasn’t quite right, the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river. I lost “come” one afternoon with the dogs in the park, I lost “fine” as the barber turned me towards the mirror, I lost “shame” - the verb and the noun in the same moment, it was a shame. I lost “carry”, I lost the things I carried - “daybook,” “pencil,” “pocket change,” “wallet” - I even lost “loss.” After a time, I had only a handful of words left, if someone did something nice for me, I would tell him, “The thing that comes before ‘you’re welcome,’” if I was hungry, I’d point at my stomach and say, “I am the opposite of full,” I’d lost “yes,” but I still had “no,” so if someone asked me, “Are you Thomas?” I would answer, “Not no,” but then I lost “no,” I went to a tattoo parlor and had YES written onto the palm of my left hand, and NO onto my right palm, what can I say, it hasn’t made life wonderful, it’s made life possible, when I rub my hands against each other in the middle of winter I am warming myself with the friction of YES and NO, when I clap my hands I am showing my appreciation through the uniting and parting of YES and NO, I signify “book” by peeling open my clapped hands, every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO, even this one, my last one, especially this one. Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more and more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent. I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it. “I” was the last word I was able to speak out aloud, which is a terrible thing, but there it is, I would walk round the neighbourhood saying “I I I I.” “You want a cup of coffee, Thomas?” “I.” “And maybe something sweet?” “I.” “How’s about this weather?” “I.” “You look upset. Is anything wrong?” I wanted to say, “Of course,” I wanted to ask, “Is anything right?” I wanted to pull the thread, unravel the scarf of my silence and start again from the beginning, but instead I said, “I.” I know I’m not alone in this disease, you hear the old people in the street and some of them are moaning, “Ay yay yay,” but some of them are clinging to their last word, “I,” they’re saying, because they’re desperate, it’s not a complaint it’s a prayer, and then I lost “I” and my silence was complete. |
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| johann wolfgang von goethe, everyday |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|04:16 pm] |
"one ought, everyday, to hear a song, read a fine poem, and, if possible, to speak a few reasonable words"
-- johann wolfgang von goethe |
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