Quotes

[loveless]

"I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder. " - Herzog

[oncebornyoucanthide]

Describing Endora is like dancing to no music...
(Peter Hedges, What's Eating Mr Grape?)

[Fade to Black]

"I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me." - Cary Grant

[oncebornyoucanthide]

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.
(Kurt Vonnegut, Beware of the man who works hard to learn)

[MaxM]

Nietzsche-Morgenröte (The Dawn Of Day)


138. BECOMING MORE TENDER.

Whenever we love some one and venerate and admire him, and afterwards come to perceive that he is suffering which always causes us the utmost astonishment, since we cannot but feel that the happiness we derive from him must flow from a superabundant source of personal happiness our feelings of love, veneration, and admiration are essentially changed: they become more tender ; that is, the gap that separates us seems to be bridged over and there appears to be an approach to equality.
It now seems possible to give him something in return, whilst we had previously imagined him as being altogether above our gratitude. Our ability to requite him for what we have received from him
arouses in us feelings of much joy and pleasure.
We endeavour to ascertain what can best calm the grief of our friend, and we give it to him ; if he wishes for kind words, looks, attentions, services, or presents, we give them ; but, above all, if he would like to see us suffering from the sight of his suffering, we pretend to suffer, for all this secures for us the enjoyment of active gratitude, which is equivalent in a way to good-natured revenge.[...]

[Silk]

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." Dr. Seuss

[loveless]

"Everything is more complicated than
you think. You only see a tenth of
what is true. There are a million
little strings attached to every
choice you make; you can destroy
your life every time you choose.
But maybe you won't know for twenty
years. And you'll never ever trace
it to its source. And you only get
one chance to play it out. Just try
and figure out your own divorce.
And they say there is no fate, but
there is: it's what you create.
Even though the world goes on for
eons and eons, you are here for a
fraction of a fraction of a second.
Most of your time is spent being
dead or not yet born. But while
alive, you wait in vain, wasting
years, for a phone call or a letter
or a look from someone or something
to make it all right. And it never
comes or it seems to but doesn't
really. And so you spend your time
in vague regret or vaguer hope for
something good to come along.
Something to make you feel
connected, to make you feel whole,
to make you feel loved. And the truth is I'm so angry and
the truth is I'm so fucking sad,
and the truth is I've been so
fucking hurt for so fucking long
and for just as long have been
pretending I'm ok, just to get
along, just for, I don't know why,
maybe because no one wants to hear
about my misery, because they have
their own, and their own is too
overwhelming to allow them to
listen to or care about mine.
Well, fuck everybody.
Amen."

-the minister, synecdoche new york, charlie kaufman

[klangspiel]

We believe we think the strange and the foreign, but in reality we never think anything but the familiar; we think not the distant, but the close that measures it. And so again, when we speak of impossibility, it is possibility alone that, providing it with a reference, already sarcastically brings impossibility under its rule. Will we ever, then, come to pose a question such as: what is impossiblity (impuissance), this non-power that would be the simple negation of power? Or will we ask ourselves: how can we discover the obscure? How can it be brought into the open? What would this experience of the obscure be, whereby the obscure would give itself in its obscurity?

-- Maurice Blanchot

[Faust]

/\ mmmm, this is why most science fiction is weak! ;-)

[todestrieb]

^ Not unless you're Lem or Lovecraft ;)

Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism. - H.P. Lovecraft

He who wields the imagination shall perish in the imagination. And yet imagination is supposed to be an open window to the world. - S. Lem

[Fade to Black]

"And the poet said that indignation was a kind of joy, but was he right?" - Saul Bellow, Herzog

[Fade to Black]

"All I ask is one thing, and I'm asking this particularly of young people that watch: Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record, it's my least favorite quality. It doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, I'm telling you, amazing things will happen." - Conan O'Brien, 1.22.2010

[deius]

The fighting had barely started when the newspapers of the Right and Left dived simultaneously into the same cesspool of abuse ... It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the newspapers do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near the front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours.

-George Orwell

[todestrieb]

The Vanity of Compassion

How can one still have ideals when there are so many blind, deaf, and mad people in the world? How can I remorsely enjoy the light another cannot see or the sound another cannot hear? I feel like a thief of light. Have we not stolen light from the blind and sound from the deaf? Isn't our very lucidity responsible for the madman's darkness? When I think about such things, I lose all courage and will, thoughts seem useless, and compassion, vain. For I do not feel mediocre enough to feel compassion for anyone. Compassion is a sign of superficiality: broken destinies and unrelenting misery either make you scream or turn you to stone. Pity is not only inefficient; it is also insulting. And besides, how can you pity another when you yourself suffer ignominously? Compassion is as common as it is because it does not bind you to anything! Nobody in this world has yet died from another's suffering. And the one who said that he died for us did not die; he was killed.

-- E.M. Cioran

[Faust]

I realize how universal the desire to injure your fellow man is. I guess it's the same in the democracies as in dictatorships. Only here the government of laws and lawyers puts a palisade up. They can injure you a lot, make your life hideous, but they can't actually do you in.

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift