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Friday

10/31/2014

Happy Halloween!

There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.
--Bram Stoker, Dracula

As always at these times when he felt really in need of God the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer.
--Stephen King, Desperation

You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.
Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
And then the nightmares will begin.
--Mark Z. Danielewski, House Of Leaves

The words sounded like a mournful incantation.
--Dan Simmons, The Terror

Son, the greatest trick the Devil pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.
--David Wong, John Dies At The End

Thursday

10/30/2014

It does us all good to unbend sometimes.
--Mark Twain, The Prince And The Pauper

I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. People come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.
--Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
--Paul Bowles, Under The Sheltering Sky

Pale as a candle flame in the dusk, tallow-pale, he stalked along, holding her hand, and Louie looked up and beyond him at the enfeebled stars. Thus, for many years, she had seen her father's head, a ghostly earth flame against the heavens, from her little height. Sam looked down on the moon of her face; the dayshine was enough still to light the eyeballs swimming up to him.
--Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“Mostly I just kill time," he said, "and it dies hard.”
--Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

Wednesday

10/29/2014

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime.
--Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.
--Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.
--E.M.Forster, Howards End

I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I'm sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual - we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I'm sure that is entirely wrong.
--D.H.Lawrence, Women In Love

Dear Jesus, do something.
--Vladimir Nabakov, Pale Fire

Monday

10/27/2014

I don't want to lose the boy with the bread.
--Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

We laugh and laugh, and nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost, or dead, or far away: right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection.
--Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.
--Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle

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.
--Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Sunday

10/26/2014

Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.
--D.H.Lawrence, Sons And Lovers

Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist--a master--and that is what Auguste Rodin was--can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body.
--Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger In A Strange Land

She looked at him in wonder. "Do people think of me like that? I only did what anybody could have done."
"That's as it may be," he replied. "The fact is, that you did it.”
--Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice

We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
--Henry James, The Turn Of The Screw

Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.
--Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

Saturday

10/25/2014

It's always taken a lot out of me, being smart.
--Eudora Welty, The Ponder Heart

Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.
--Aldous Huxley, Chrome Yellow

I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.
--Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman's Camden Conversations

History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations.
--Arthur Koestler, Darkness At Noon

She turned; she bruised under her heel the scaly head of this dark suspicion-as terrifying to her as his guilt was to him. 'O Absalom, my Absalom!' Come, come, we will not entertain such a thought. God himself would not urge it upon a mother.
--Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy

Thursday

10/23/2014

Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy.
--Isabel Allende, The House Of The Spirits

Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas.
--Jose Saramago, Death With Interruptions

He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.
--Stephen Crane, The Red Badge Of Courage

Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.
--J.M.Barrie, Peter Pan

I knew you'd never be American enough to help me reconstruct my life.
--Zane Grey, The Call Of The Canyon

Wednesday

10/22/2014

Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear but only wildness of heart that springs from such longing.
--Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
--Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One's Own

Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life?
See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Morrocan midnight. Love a beautiful woman.
--Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
--William Faulkner, Light In August

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.
--Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Tuesday

10/21/2014

The smell of peace is abroad, the air is cold, the skies are brittle, and the leaves have finally fallen. I wear a pony coat with skin like watered silk and muff of lamb. My fingers lie in depths of warmth. I have a jacket of silver sequins and heavy bracelets of rich corals. I wear about my neck a triple thread-like chain of lapis lazulis and pearls. On my face is softness and content like a veil of golden moonlight. And I have never in all my lives been so lonely.
--Erik Larson, In The Garden Of Beasts: Love, Terror, And An American Family In Hitler's Berlin

We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.
--Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious LIves Of Human Cadavers

Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.
--Ray Bradbury, Death Is A Lonely Business

He feels, as he sometimes does, as most people must, a presence in the room, what he can only think of as his and Rebecca's living ghosts, the amalgamation of their dreams and their breathing, their smells. He does not believe in ghosts, but he believes in...something. Something viable, something living, that's surprised when he wakes at this hour, that's neither glad nor sorry to see him awake but that recognizes the fact, because it has been interrupted in its nocturnal inchoate musings.
--Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. And when I would have to look at them day after day, each with his and her secret and selfish thought, and blood strange to each other blood and strange to mine, and think that this seemed to be the only way I could get ready to stay dead, I would hate my father for having ever planted me. I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.
--William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Monday

10/20/2014

Whatever voice spoke him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity. a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath.
--Cormac McCarthy, Child Of God

You grow up to become living proof of your parents' limitations. Their less-than masterpiece.
--Chuck Palahniuk, Rant

Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
--Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

You’ll find out it’s little savors and little things that count more than big ones. A walk on a spring morning is better than an eighty-mile ride in a hopped-up car, you know why? Because it’s full of flavors, full of a lot of things growing. You’ve time to seek and find. I know, you’re after the broad effect now, I suppose that’s fit and proper. But you got to look at grapes as well as watermelons. You greatly admire skeletons and I like fingerprints; well, and good. Right now such things are bothersome to you, and I wonder if it isn’t because you never learned to use them. If you had your way you’d pass a law to abolish all the little jobs, the little things. But then you’d leave yourselves nothing to do between the big jobs and you’d have a devil of a time thinking up things? Cutting grass and pulling weeds can be a way of life.
--Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something-a scrap of paper-something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone can't be is because it never can become was because it can't ever die or perish.
--William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

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