By Category: World
“How damned ridiculous it all is! The long generations toiling - skimping, lashing themselves screwing higher and higher the tension of their minds, polishing brighter and brighter the mirror of intelligence to end in this - My God what a time - All the cant and hypocrisy, all the damnable survivals, all the vestiges of old truths now putrid and false infect the air, choke you worse than German gas - The ministers from their damn smug pulpits, the business men - the heroics about war - my country right or wrong - oh infinities of them! Oh the tragic farce of the world.”
-The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, John Dos Passos
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“To the person in the Bell Jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
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“Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry and cream, Mother Goose world, Alice in Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?”
-Unabridged Journals, Sylvia Plath
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“Certain illnesses sweep across large communities, and then we learn that no such illnesses ever existed. Men and women recover memories of having been sexually abused as children. Whoosh, no they don't, their parents are reinstated as the most loving and laudable people you could imagine. Genocide occurs; no it doesn't. Nuclear waste contaminates large swathes of entire continents, and we all learn words like 'half-life.' But in a flash all the contamination has gone, the sheep aren't ticking, you can happily eat your lamb chops.
The maps are wrong. Frontiers snake across disputed territory, bending and cracking. A road no longer goes where it went yesterday. A lake vanishes. Mountains rise and fall. Well-known books acquire different endings. Color bursts out of black-and-white movies. Art is a hoax. Style is substance. The dead are embarrassing. There are no dead.
You're a sports fan but the rules are different every time you watch. You've got a job! No you don't! That woman powdered the President's Johnson! In her dreams--she's a celebrated fantasist! You're a sex god! You're a sex pest! She's to die for! She's a slut! [not necessarily irreconcilable truths; merely different views of a single circumstance] You don't have cancer! April Fool, yes you do! That good man in Nigeria is a murderer! That murderer in Algeria is a good man! That psycho killer is an American patriot! That American psycho is a patriot killer! And is that Pol Pot dying in the Angkoran jungle, or merely Nol Not?
These things are bad for you: sex, high-rise buildings, chocolate, lack of exercise, dictatorship, racism! No, au contraire! Celibacy damages the brain, high-rise buildings bring us closer to God, tests show that a bar of chocolate a day significantly improves children's academic performance, exercise kills, tyranny is just a part of our culture so I'll thank you to keep your cultural-imperialist ideas off my fucking fiefdom, and as for racism, let's not get all preachy about this, it's better out in the open than under some grubby carpet. That extremist is a moderate! That universal right is culturally specific! This circumcised woman is culturally happy! That Aboriginal whistlecockery is culturally barbaric! Pictures don't lie! This image has been faked! Free the press! Ban nosy journalists! The novel is dead! Honor is dead! God is dead! Aargh, they're all alive, and they're coming after us! that star is rising! No, she's falling! We dined at nine! We dined at eight! You were on time! no, you were late! East is West! Up is down! Yes is No! In is Out! Lies are Truth! Hate is Love! Two and two makes five! And everything is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.”
-The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie
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“I just don't think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was virtue.”
-Se7en [movie]
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“Pain pays the income of each precious thing.”
-The Rape of Lucrece, William Shakespeare
Recommended by Mea Culpa.
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“4000 hungry children
Leave us per hour from starvation
While billions are spent on bombs
Creating death showers.”
-Boom, System of A Down
Recommended by Jenn.
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“In unending storms, we search for space to breathe
How our hearts are worn - we've come so far
In this desert storm, how we blossom and we cease
Tell your story now, we have so much to know
Shine with all the untold, hold the light given unto you
Find the love to unfold in this broken world.”
-Shine, Vienna Teng
Recommended by Shay.
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“For I dipped into the Future, far as
human eye could see;
Saw the vision of the world, and all
the wonder that would be.”
-Locksley Hall, Lord Alfred Tennyson
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“The biggest truth to face now—what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life—is that I don't think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.”
-A Man Without A Country, Kurt Vonnegut
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“...teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492.
The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. ”
-Breakfast Of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
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“Were we no better than chessmen, moved by an unseen power, vessels the potter fashions at his fancy, for honour or for shame? His reason revolted against it, and yet he felt that some tragedy was hanging over him, and that he had been suddenly called upon to bear an intolerable burden. Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to play parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”
-Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, Oscar Wilde
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“The youth was drowned in the deepest sea--an atom bombarded, ignorant of all defense in a tumultuous world. The shell of custom, the easy thoughtless life which had sucked pleasure from the world about, these four years past, crumbled like caked mud. He was nothing, nobody--there was no heart or bravery left in him; he was conscious of unfathomable ignorance--the beginning, as Socrates suggested, of wisdom--he was lost.
He had wanted to cut a figure in the world--he had simply never imagined the number of people that were in it. And like most people who hug loneliness to them like a lover, the need of occasional companionship, forever tender and forever true, which might be summoned or dismissed at will, cut through him like a sword.”
-Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe
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“The youth was drowned in the deepest sea--an atom bombarded, ignorant of all defense in a tumultuous world. The shell of custom, the easy thoughtless life which had sucked pleasure from the world about, these four years past, crumbled like caked mud. He was nothing, nobody--there was no heart or bravery left in him; he was conscious of unfathomable ignorance--the beginning, as Socrates suggested, of wisdom--he was lost.
He had wanted to cut a figure in the world--he had simply never imagined the number of people that were in it. And like most people who hug loneliness to them like a lover, the need of occasional companionship, forever tender and forever true, which might be summoned or dismissed at will, cut through him like a sword.”
-Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe
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“The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
-A Room Of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
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“Our whole world is nothing but a world of grief and misery, and its inhabitants are nothing but grieving and miserable people. The living beings on this earth are all destined for slaughter. The azure heaven and the round earth are no more than a great slaughter-yard, a great prison.”
-K'ang Yu-Wei
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