By Category: Life
“'Cause I dont care if they eat me alive
I've got better things to do than survive.”
-Swan Dive, Ani DiFranco
~
“and you can dangle your carrot,
but i ain't gonna reach for it,
'cause i need both my hands
to play my guitar.
and life is a sleazy stranger
who looks vaguely familiar,
flirting with a bimbo named disaster
at the end of the bar.”
-The Million You Never Made, Ani DiFranco
Recommended by ariasna.
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“But Jesus, when you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both, it's health, you worry about getting rupture or something. If everything is simply jake then you're frightened of death.”
-The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy
~
“Dr. Thurman: Do you feel alone right now?
Donnie: Oh, I don't know. I mean, I'd like to believe I'm not, but I just, I've just never seen any proof. So, I... I just don't debate it anymore, y'know? It's like, I could spend my whole life debating it over and over again, weighing the pros and cons, and in the end, I still wouldn't have any proof. So, I just, I just don't debate it anymore. It's absurd.
Dr. Thurman: The search for God is absurd?
Donnie: It is if everyone dies alone.”
-Donnie Darko [movie]
~
“Is not all life pathetic and futile? ...We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow - misery.”
-The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
~
“Tell the angel who will watch over your future destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man who, like Satan, thought himself, for an instant, equal to God; but who now acknowledges, with Christian humility, that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom...There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.”
-Le comte de Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
~
“My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.”
-A Song For Simeon, T.S. Eliot
~
“THEY are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
The brown waves of fog toss up to me 5
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.”
-Morning at the Window, T.S. Eliot
~
“Birth, and copulation, and death.
That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks;
Birth, copulation and death.”
-Sweeney Agonistes, T.S. Eliot
~
“...where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term "generosity of spirit" applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire-meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in...this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged...”
-American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
~
“Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life. Grief made them wander. We heard reports of the girls walking aimlessly through Eastland, down the lighted mall with it's timid fountains and hot dogs impaled beneath heat lamps. Now and then they fingered a blouse, or a dress, but bought nothing.”
-The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
~
“Drunk and kissing us, or passing out in chairs, they were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived-bound, in other words, for life.”
-The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
~
“Most of the diary told us more about how the girls came to be than why they killed themselves. We got tired of hearing about what they ate ('Monday, February 13. Today we had frozen pizza...'), or what they wore, or which colors they favored. They all detested creamed corn. Mary had chipped her tooth on the monkey bars and had a cap. ('I told you,' Kevin Head said, reading that.) And so we learned about their lives, came to hold collective memories of times we hadn't experienced, harbored private images of Lux leaning over the side of a ship to stroke her first whale, and saying, 'I didn't think these would stink so much,' while Therese answered, 'It's the kelp in their baleens rotting.' We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called 'sewery.' We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Libson had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the 'Kevins' out. We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that fascinated them.”
-The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
~
“She came out west just to break the spell
After three long years in a marriage from hell
Six months clean living sober and right
Her doctors tell her everything will be alright
Yeah, you just take your pill
And everything will be alright
She looks like a teenage anthem
She looks like a magazine girl
She looks like a teenage anthem
Like she used to be happy in another world
She looks like a teenage anthem
She is happy with the girl inside
She looks like a teenage anthem
And looks like she could have been happy in another life
In another life
Happy in another life.”
-Amphetamine, Everclear
Recommended by Ashley.
~
“Yeah, you ought to take your medication every day
Be a good dog, live life in a wonderful way.”
-Normal Like You, Everclear
Recommended by Shay.
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“I had seen the results of that ultimately humane treatment, the frontal lobotomy. For this, they remove a chunk of skull in the forehead area, stick an instrument not unlike an ice pick down to the brain where, with a few curt brushes, they scrape away all grief, all rage, all violence, all the things that make us Man, leaving one great hulk of loonily smiling protoplasm.”
-A Fan's Notes, Frederick Exley
~
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning --
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
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“This was the world in which she grew and he aged. They made for themselves a sanctuary from Trachimbrod, a habitat completely unlike the rest of the world. No hateful words were ever spoken, and no hands raised. More than that, no angry words were ever spoken, and nothing was denied. But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.”
-Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
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“I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.”
-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
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“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?”
-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
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“Two roads diverged into a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
-The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost
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“Didn't Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to Faust? Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also, in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make: the pain and terror we will take from others' shoulders; our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false.
There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination.”
-Moab is My Washpot, Stephen Fry
~
“It can come a bit hard sometimes to see one's own unique, heroic life pinned so pitilessly to a wall. At other times it can endorse, affirm and save, but as I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything matters at all but me.”
-Moab is My Washpot, Stephen Fry
~
“Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.
She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny Frenchwoman with white hair, with a daughter and a granddaughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.
Or that's a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.
Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months' pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.
There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.
There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter's wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.”
-Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman
~
“Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
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