“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the fruitless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessesity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life”
—Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham
January 2012
19 posts
“She put the lamp upon the floor, spread the paper flat; and began to show me the words she had written, one by one”
—Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
“And when I shall die, take him and cut him up in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will fall in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun”
—Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare
“Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.”
—Joseph Campbell
“I don’t know, I don’t want to talk as much. It’s nicer to think dear, pretty thoughts and keep them in one’s heart, like treasures. I don’t like to have them laughed at or wondered over.”
—Anne of Green Gables
“
There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.
Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.
“dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where Because we grew up surrounded by big there is none”
—Kurt Vonnegut
“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
—Friedrich Nietzche
“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird”
—Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird
“Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.”
—Daniel Woodrell
“The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.”
—Chuck Palahniuk
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another”
—Carl Sagan
“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself”
—Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre
“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
—Robert Frost
“Wherever we go we carry this burden of our personal consciousness and wherever we step we open it out over our heads like a great baleful cotton umbrella to obstruct the prospect and obscure the light of heaven”
—Henry James
“Life is short. Break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that made you smile. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
—Mark Twain
“The stars are like trees in the forest, alive and breathing and they’re watching me.”
—Haruki Murakami
“Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better”
—Henry Rollins
“The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history.”
—Lemony Snicket
December 2011
123 posts
“I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.”
—A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
