Quotes By Letter: D

“Conformists look around and follow closely; Nonconformists look around and do the opposite. Individualists don't look around a lot.”

-Eromon D'Alyzala

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“... do you know what the opposite of love is?
Hate, I said.
Despair, Sister said. Despair is the opposite of love.”

-The High Divide, Charles D'Ambrosio

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“Every decision you make is a mistake.”

-Edward Dahlberg

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“Anger or hatred is like a fisherman's hook. It is very important for us to ensure that we are not caught by it.”

-Dalai Lama

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“Damaged people are dangerous, they know they can survive.”

-Damage [movie]

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“It's not like boyscout badges
nor are they medals of honor
my skin's my mother earth -
I'm just trying to exert some control upon her.

I don't think I'll make it to the end
of when this tug of war is over.
The give and take of slice and fake
a smile - my cheeks are sore and I'm not sober.

(all of these increasing scars
have become my prison bars)”

-The Abyss, Dan

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“'You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place.

'Old shelters—television, magazines, movies—won't protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That's when you'll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you've walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper.

'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.'”

-House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

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“"I still get nightmares. In fact I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares. For a while there I tried every pill imaginable. Anything to curb the fear. Excedrin PMs, Melatonin, L-tryptophan, Valium, Vicodin, quite a few members of the barbital family. A pretty extensive list, frequently mixed often matched, with shots of bourbon, a few lung rasping bong hits, sometimes even the vaporous confidence-trip of cocaine. None of it helped. I think it's pretty safe to assume there's no lab sophisticated enough yet to synthesize the kind of chemicals I need.”

-House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

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“We never even kissed or looked into each other's eyes. Our lips just trespassed on those inner labyrinths hidden deep within our ears, filled them with the private music of wicked words, hers in many languages, mine in the off color of my only tongue, until as our tones hesitated, raced harder, syllables soon melting with groans, or moans, finding purchase in new words, or old words, or made-up words, until we gathered up our heat and refused to release it, enjoying too much the dark language we had suddenly stumbled upon, craved to, carved to, not a communication really but a channeling of our rumored desires, hers for all I know gone to Black Forests and wolves, mine banging back to a familiar form, that great revenant mystery I still could only hear the shape of, which in spite of our separate lusts and individual cries still continued to drive us deeper into stranger tones, our mutual desire to keep gripping the burn fueled by sound, hers screeching, mine- I didn't hear mine- only hers, probably counter-pointing mine, a high-pitched cry, then a whisper dropping unexpectedly to practically a bark, a grunt, whatever, no sense any more, and suddenly no more curves either, just the straight away, some line crossed, where every fractured sound already spoken finally compacts into one long agonizing word, easily exceeding a hundred letters, even thunder, anticipating the inevitable letting go, when the heat is ultimately too much to bear, threatening to burn, scar, tear it all apart, yet tempting enough to hold onto for even one second more, to extend it all, if we can, as if by getting that much closer to the heat, that much more enveloped, would prove... -which when we did clutch, hold, postpone, did in fact prove too much after all, seconds too much, and impossible to refuse, so blowing all of everything apart, shivers and shakes and deep in her throat a thousand letters crashing in a long unmodulated fall, resonating deep within my cochlea and down the cochlear nerve, a last fit of fury describing in lasting detail the shape of things already come.

Too bad dark languages rarely survive.

As quickly as they're invented, they die, unable to penetrate much, explore anything or even connect. Terribly beautiful but more often than not inadequate. So I guess it's no surprise that what I recall now with the most clarity is actually pretty odd.”

-House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

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“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”

-House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

~

“You were leaving as I
was leaving and so I
tried before that great
leaving to grant you
the greatest gift of all.
The purest gift of all.
The gift to end all gifts.

I kissed your cheeks and your head and after awhile put my hands around your throat. How red your face got even then as your tiny and oh so delicate hands stayed clamped around my wrists. But you did not struggle as I anticipated. You probably understood what I was doing for you. You were probably grateful. Yes, you were grateful.”

-The Whalestoe Letters, Mark Z. Danielewski

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“Yet if you build your life on dreams
'Tis prudent to recall
The man with moonlight in his hand
Has nothing there at all.”

-Don Quixote: Man of La Mancha, Joe Darion

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“One man scorned and covered with scars still strive with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this.”

-The Impossible Dream (The Quest), Joe Darion

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“These cuts are leaving creases
Trace the scar, fit the pieces,
Tell your story, you don't need to say a word
Call off the cavalry
Can't save a wretch like me
Clean this with kerosene
If you can't leave it be, might as well make it bleed
Scalpeled, sutured, made whole again.”

-If You Can't Leave It Be, Dashboard Confessional

Recommended by Jess.

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“Laced with brilliant smiles and shining eyes,
And perfect makeup,
But you're barely scraping by.”

-The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most, Dashboard Confessional

Recommended by Anne.

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“And the fog rolls heavy on her
and she feels the weight of life
though it's red blood flowing from her heart
it feels like cold blue ice
and the colours mix together
to grey.”

-Grey Street, Dave Matthews Band

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“She feels like kicking out all the windows
And setting fire to this life
She could change everything about her
Using colors bold and bright
But all the colors mix together to grey
And it breaks her heart.”

-Grey Street, Dave Matthews Band

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“One sees that dead, vacant look steal sometimes over the rarest, finest of women's faces, - in the very midst, it may be, of their warmest summer's day; and then one can guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces and brilliant smile.”

-Life in the Iron Mills, Rebecca Harding Davis

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“This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.”

-River out of Eden, Richard Dawkins

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“We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. ...In the face of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. Here's another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time, the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, the present century. The present moves from the past to the future like a tiny spotlight inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere on the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.”

-Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins

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“Dreams aren't perfect. They come true, not free.”

-Dawson's Creek [television show]

Recommended by Becky.

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“No more cells, no more bars, no more life in a cage!”

-Dead Man Walking [movie]

Recommended by Suggested by Lizzie.

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“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”

-The Dead Poet's Society [movie]

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“We don't read and write poetry because its cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is full of passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering: these are noble pursuits necessary to sustain life, but poetry, beauty, romance, love. These are what we stay alive for.”

-The Dead Poet's Society [movie]

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“Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.”

-James Dean

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