Quote of the day

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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Franz Kafka from The Metamorphosis

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.


And then, one day, you die.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

That ever happen to you?

How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense.

Who hasn't hoped and prayed that might work?

He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.

If only until the workers of the world unite.

I only fear danger where I want to fear it.

Nope, it's never worked that way for me.

Then his head sank to the floor of its own accord and from his nostrils came the last faint flicker of his breath.

Him and [eventually] all the rest of us.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Mieko Kawakami

It feels like I’m trapped inside my body. It decides when I get hungry, and when I’ll get my period. From birth to death, you have to keep eating and making money just to stay alive.


The Fall, right?

Everything that I could see was beautiful. I cried and cried, standing there, surrounded by that beauty, even though I wasn’t standing anywhere. I could hear the sound of my own tears. Everything was beautiful. Not that there was anyone to share it with, anyone to tell. Just the beauty.

Next up: Everything that I could see was ugly.

Yeah, my mum was free labor—free labor with a pussy.

Imagine that.

If you make plenty of money but don't have any kids, you might get called successful. But unless you have kids, no one will ever call you a great woman.

My guess: That's still debatable.

At first, suicide was just a word, a vague idea separate from reality. It pointed at a way that other people chose to die, people I didn't even know. But once the word became my own, it took on the strangest shape. I could feel it growing deep inside of me. Suicide wasn't something that happened to strangers. I could make it happen, if I wanted to.

Let's not go there, okay? This time.

I recognize that luck, effort, and ability are often indistinguishable. And I know that, in the end, I’m just another human being, who’s born only to die. I know that in reality, it makes no difference whether I write novels, and it makes no difference if anyone cares. With all the countless books already out there, the world won’t notice if I fail to publish even one book with my name on it. That’s no tragedy. I know that. I get that.

You tell me if she's just like all the rest of us: https://www.google.com/search?source=hp ... gle+Search
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Don DeLillo from White Noise

Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed homebody, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood. You spot something out of the corner of your eye. Before you know anything else, you know that this thing is very large and that it has no place in your ordinary frame of reference. A flaw in the world picture. Either it shouldn't be here or you shouldn't. Now the thing comes into full view. It is a grizzly bear, enormous, shiny brown, swaggering, dripping slime from its bared fangs. Jack, you have never seen a large animal in the wild. The sight of this grizzer is so electrifyingly strange that it gives you a renewed sense of yourself, a fresh awareness of the self— the self in terms of a unique and horrific situation. You see yourself in a new and intense way. You rediscover yourself. You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment. The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surroundings, alone, distinct, whole. The name we give this complicated process is fear.


On the other hand: https://youtu.be/vavcSWSbUgE

How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed.

Anyone stupid enough to come here unarmed?

You don't believe in heaven? A nun?
If you don't, why should I?
If you did, maybe I would.
If I did, you would not have to.


They're still going at it.

I don't know whether to feel good or bad about learning that my experience is widely shared.

Some never do.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

No, really, anyone here believe that?

People get bitten. But I won't. I found myself saying,
You will, you will. These snakes don't know you find death inconceivable. They don't know you're young and strong and you think death applies to everyone but you. They will bite you and you will die.


And not just in a novel.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Cormac McCarthy from The Road

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them. It didnt even know they were there.


In a dystopia, say.

We used to talk about death, she said. We don’t anymore. Why is that?
I don’t know.
It’s because it’s here. There’s nothing left to talk about.


In a dystopia, say.

I wouldn’t leave you.
I don’t care. It’s meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I’ve taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot.
Death is not a lover.
O yes he is.
Please don’t do this.
I’m sorry.
I can’t do it alone.


And then, of course, those who prefer it alone.

The hundred nights they'd sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall.

Wow, he thought, not unlike most of us here.

You say you can't? Then don't do it.

If you get his drift.

There was a sharp crack from somewhere on the mountain. Then another. It's just a tree falling, he said. It's okay. The boy was looking at the dead roadside trees. It's okay, the man said. All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us.

Anyone here have a tree fall on them?
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Joseph Heller from Catch--22

Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.


Of course that's Catch-1.

What would they do to me, he asked in confidential tones, if I refused to fly them?
We'd probably shoot you, ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen replied.
We? Yossarian cried in surprise. What do you mean, we? Since when are you on their side?
If you're going to be shot, whose side do you expect me to be on? ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen retorted.


Ah, of course, the real world.

To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

Or you cash in doing commercials.

When people disagreed with him he urged them to be objective.

Or else, some would add.

When I was a kid, Orr replied, I used to walk around all day with crab apples in my cheeks. One in each cheek.
... A minute passed. Why? Yossarian found himself forced to ask finally.
Orr tittered triumphantly. Because they're better than horse chestnuts... When I couldn't get crab apples, Orr continued, I used horse chestnuts. Horse chestnuts are about the same size as crab apples and actually have a better shape, although the shape doesn't matter a bit.
Why did you walk around with crab apples in your cheeks? Yossarian asked again. That's what I asked.
Because they've got a better shape than horse chestnuts, Orr answered. I just told you that.
Why, swore Yossarian at him approvingly, you evil-eyed, mechanically aptituded, disaffiliated son of a bitch, did you walk around with anything in your cheeks?
I didn't, Orr said, walk around with anything in my cheeks. I walked around with crab applies in my cheeks. When I couldn't get crab apples I walked around with horse chestnuts. In my cheeks.


And we all know who that reminds us of.

I used to get a big kick out of saving people’s lives. Now I wonder what the hell’s the point, since they all have to die anyway.
Oh, there’s a point, all right, Dunbar assured him.
Is there? What’s the point?
The point is to keep them from dying as long as you can.
Yeah, but what’s the point, since they all have to die anyway?
The trick is not to think about that.
Never mind the trick. What the hell’s the point?
Dunbar pondered in silence for a few moments. Who the hell knows.


Then someone invented philosophy. And at least we knew theoretically.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Doris Lessing from The Golden Notebook

...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule?


Because we can still get away with it?

People don’t mind immoral messages. They don’t mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex’s sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love is love. What they can’t stand is to be told it all doesn’t matter, they can’t stand formlessness.

This and the grim stuff that I pursue.

You’re a normal human being. What right have you to that?

Sure, go ahead, give it a shot.

A hundred things to do, but only one thing to be, he said, obstinately.

That's the crux of it, right Mr. Objectivist?
God or No God, of course.


Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

Unless, perhaps, as with you and I here, it's all done virtually.

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade.

And, for some of us, into oblivion itself.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Ivan Turgenev from Fathers and Sons

Death's an old story, but new for each person.


Whatever that's worth.

The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they've suddenly become nihilists.

Go ahead, run with it.

Every single man hangs by a thread, a bottomless pit can open beneath him any minute, and yet he still goes on thinking up unpleasantnesses for himself and making a mess of his life.

Next up: every single woman.

What a magnificent body, how I should like to see it on the dissecting table.

Known a few of them myself.

A nihilist is a man who doesn’t acknowledge any authorities, who doesn’t accept a single principle on faith, no matter how much that principle may be surrounded by respect.

You know, among other things.

Nowhere does time pass as swiftly as in Russia, though they say that in prison it passes even more quickly.

If he says so.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. from Slaughterhouse-Five

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.


Let's decide: Is that even possible?

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

No, really, what did you come up with?

How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

On the other hand, from who?

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

So it goes here too: https://youtu.be/YcR9k8o4I0w

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Capitalism, let's call it!!

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

Back then, sure. Now it's the 10,500 Walmarts.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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The Onion

Arkansas Gov. Huckabee Sanders Signs Law Rolling Back Child Labor Protections


Praise the Lord!

Report: 50% Of Heaven’s Population Just Assholes Who Begged For Forgiveness At Last Second

Actually, that wouldn't surprise me.

Bored Census Bureau Employee Changes Every Ohio Resident’s Name to Laura

Any Laura's from Ohio here?

Man Wonders If Speeding Ticket Just Karma For Going 120 MPH

Anyone know if karma might include that?

Woman On Third Level Of Purgatory Tired Of Being Passed Over For Advancement By Less Penitent Men

Enough is enough, right?!

Insane Man Makes It Through Another Day Without Anyone Catching On

Yo, Age!
Just Kidding.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Jennifer Egan from A Visit from the Goon Squad

Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?
Scotty shook his head. The goon won.


Of course, it always wins eventually.

I’m done. I’m old, I’m sad --- that’s on a good day.

Of course, that's all of us eventually.

She was clean: no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?

Actaully, I am clean myself.

I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.

Actually, I don't grasp that myself.

I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?

On the other hand, real compared to what?

Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.

You know, if that's actually true.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Ken Kesey from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

If somebody'd of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they'd of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons.


And the World Series no less.

He who---what was it?---walks out of step, hears another drum.

Well, in the cuckoo's nest he does.

But the new guy is different, and the Acutes can see it, different from anybody been coming on this ward for the past ten years, different from anybody they ever met outside. He's just as vulnerable, maybe, but the Combine didn't get him.

Of course, we all know how that turns out.

Does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost over night?

He means Juicy Fruit of course.

Nobody complains about all the fog. I know why, now: as bad as it is, you can slip back in it and feel safe. That’s what McMurphy can’t understand, us wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in the open where we’d be easy to get at.

Sooner or later the fog comes for everyone.

Most merciful God, accept these two poor sinners into your arms. And keep the doors ajar for the coming of the rest of us, because you are witnessing the end, the absolute, irrevocable, fantastic end. I’ve finally realized what is happening. It is our last fling. We are doomed henceforth. Must screw our courage to the sticking point and face up to our impending fate. We shall be all of us shot at dawn. One hundred cc’s apiece. Miss Ratched shall line us all against the wall, where we face the terrible maw of a muzzle-loading shotgun which she has loaded with Miltowns! Thorazines! Libriums! Stelazines! And with a wave of her sword, blooie! Tranquilize all of us completely out of existence.

Right, tell that to the VA.
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Re: Quote of the day

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Numerius Negedius wrote:How unfortunate that we lost our last cow. How fortunate that we have you.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Vladimir Nabokov from Pale Fire

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.


You know, if we correctly understand this.

Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.

Next up [of course]: true philosophy.

Do those clowns really believe what they teach?

Next up [of course]: do those clowns really believe what they learn?

On such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen mud and horror in my heart.

That ever happen to you?

When I hear a critic speaking of an author’s sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool.

Any critics here?

I am a strict vegetarian...The usual questions were fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple.

Fuck it, he thought, I'll eat anything.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Anthony Burgess from A Clockwork Orange

You were not put on this Earth just to get in touch with God.


Lots of different ways to skew that, right?

Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.

Of course your youth might have been different.

I am everyone's friend,I said. Except to my enemies.

Clockwork orange logic let's call it.

It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.

You know, before the Ludovico Technique kicked in.

By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange - meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State.

Unless, by definition, a human being is not.

You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise Bog! I'm cured!

No, but he was well on his way.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Italo Calvino from If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.


Of course, it's considerably more complicated today.

The book I'm looking for, says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.

Did anyone here find it?
Did anyone here write it?


Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things.

Coming here, for example.

Reading is solitude.

Not unlike writing.
If they let you.


From mirror to mirror — this is what I happen to dream of — the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the soul, and a system of mirrors that would multiply my image would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine.

Yeah, right.

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather: that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city.

Cue Robert Blake?
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