"Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in ours souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood."
       "That's rather a broad idea," I remarked.
       "One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature," he answered.

-->"I recall there was something very important, very fragile. But then a terrible thing happened and it got broken. Forever. Nobody could ever mend it." -Alice

-->"They are bright and exciting. Like America. Like its women." -Bauer

-->"One's memory is such a curious place. You see, there's the way things seemed, and then there is the way things were...and one is so often the total reverse of the other." -Alice

( Suggestive text behind this cut )

Probably one of the best graphic novels ever written.

 "Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education."

Invisible Monsters
by Chuck Palahniuk 

Any society which would give up a little liberty to gain a little security deserves neither and loses both.

"There are the wheels, Watson. Quick, man, if you love me! And don't budge, whatever happens--whatever happens, do you hear? Don't speak! Don't move! Just listen with all your ears."

-Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Dying Detective.

I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand.

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

One knew nothing. One lived and walked about on the earth or rode through the forests, and so many things looked at one with such challenge and promise, rousing such longing: an evening star, a bluebell, a lake green with reeds, the eye of a human being or of a cow, and at times it seemed as if the very next moment something never seen but long yearned for must happen, as if a veil must drop from everything. But then it passed, and nothing happened, and the riddle was not solved, nor was the secret spell lifted, and finally one became old... and perhaps one still knew nothing, would still be waiting and listening.

Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund.

If only the world were in the hands of women, Zari thought. Women give birth. They are creators, and they know the value of their creation, the value of endurance, patience, monotony, and being unable to do anything for oneself. Perhaps because men have never been creators, they'll take any risk to create something. If the world were in the hands of women, how could there be wars? If they take the blessings that you have away from you, what then?

We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn't as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness.

A Raspberry Sweater
to George Montgomery

It is next to my flesh,
that’s why. I do what I want.
And in the pale New Hampshire
twilight a black bug sits in the blue,
strumming its legs together. Mournful
glass, and daisies closing. Hay
swells in the nostrils. We shall go
to the motorcycle races in Laconia
and come back all calm and warm.



To John Ashbery

I can’t believe there’s not
another world where we will sit
and read new poems to each other
high on a mountain in the wind.
You can be Tu Fu, I’ll be Po Chu-i
and the Monkey Lady’ll be in the moon,
smiling at our ill-fitting heads
as we watch snow settle on a twig.
Or shall we be really gone? this
is not the grass I saw in my youth!
and if the moon, when it rises
tonight, is empty —a bad sign,
meaning ‘You go, like the blossoms.’

"And that's the thing, she concludes. Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. "Slow" works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower."

"In a way, John Voss is like Jesus - blameless, perhaps, but nevertheless the center of all the trouble... Dead? Is that what she means? She hopes not. No one could want this boy, this child who had dangled from a laundry bag inside a dark closet, not to exist. Merely for him not to exist here, because here has proven to be the wrong place. She feels like Jesus' disciples must've felt. They never wanted him crucified, of course, but what a relief it must have been when the stone was rolled across the entrance to the tomb, sealing everything shut so they could go back to being fishermen, which they knew how to do, rather than fishers of men, which they didn't. No wonder they didn't recognize him later on the road to Emmaus. They didn't want to, any more than Tick wants to welcome this poor boy back into their midst."

-Empire Falls - Richard Russo

 

The moon versus us ever sleeping together again
by Richard Brautigan

I sit here, an arch-villain of romance,
thinking about you. Gee, I'm sorry
I made you unhappy, but there was nothing
I could do about it because I have to be free.
Perhaps everything would have been different
if you had stayed at the table or asked me
to go out with you to look at the moon,
instead of getting up and leaving me alone with
     her.

"Liberty," boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, "is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses."
"Yeah?" said Shadow.
"Quoting," said Wednesday. "Quoting someone French. That's who they have a statue to, in their New York harbor: a bitch who liked to be fucked on the refuse from the tumbril. Hold your torch as high as you want to, m'dear, there's still rats in your dress and cold jism dripping down your leg."

"Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?"

"An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts."

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."

"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead."

"You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad."

"Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you."

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.