Somehow you've stumbled across my blog. I see no reason for pretty outlines, borders, or Photoshop art. It's a personal journal; what matters is what's said, not what the background looks like. There's little here to entertain you.

"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."

"'You're bananas,' she said.
'Then split with me.'"

"In hot climates, A provides a shady arch, O is a siphon through which to suck liquids, U a cool cave or tub to slide into; A stands like a surfer with its legs apart, O hangs like a citrus from a bough, U rolls its hula hips - and I and E mimic the cries of monkeys and jungle birds from which they were derived. Consonants, like fair-skinned men, do not thrive in torrid zones. Vowels are built for southern comfort, consonants for northern speed. But O how the natives do bOOgIE-wOOgIE while the planters WaLTZ."

(How do you make love stay?)
"Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free."

"'There's always the same amount of good luck and bad luck in the world. If one person doesn't get the bad luck, somebody else will have to get it in their place. There's always the same amount of good and evil, too. We can't eradicate evil, we can only evict it, force it to move across town. And when evil moves, some good always goes with it. But we can never alter the ratio of good to evil. All we can do is keep things stirred up so neither good nor evil solidifies. That's when things get scary. Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.'"

Tags: quotes

I haven't written an actual entry in ages. I'd like to take that as a good sign. 

"The best thing - in Shadow's opinion, perhps the only good thing - about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it." 

"'How do you do, Mr. Czernobog?'
'I do old. My guts ache, my back hurts, and i cough my chest apart every morning.'"

"Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition."

"This is wild rice country. Moose country. What I'm trying to say is that America is like that. It's not good growing country for gods. They don't grow well here. They're like avocados trying to grow in wild rice country."

Tags: quotes

I swear that I would include the entire book as a quote if I could.  

"Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made." 

"This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon."

"People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. Others would come to help them. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. What had they done? He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it."

"In a pocket of his knapsack he'd found a last half packet of cocoa and he fixed it for the boy and then poured his own cup with hot water and sat blowing at the rim.
You promised not to do that, the boy said.
What?
You know what, Papa.
He poured the hot water back into the pan and took the boy's cup and poured some of the cocoa into his own and then handed it back.
I have to watch you all the time, the boy said.
I know.
If you break little promises you'll break big ones. That's what you said.
I know. But I wont."

"When they'd eaten he took the boy out on the gravelbar below the bridge and he pushed away the thin shore ice with a stick and they knelt there while he washed the boy's face and his hair. The water was so cold the boy was crying. They moved down the gravel to find fresh water and he washed his hair again as well as he could and finally stopped because the boy was moaning with the cold of it. He dried him with the blanket, kneeeling there in the glow of the light with the shadow of the bridge's understructure broken across the palisade of treetrunks beyond the creek. This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job. Then he wrapped him in the blanket and carried him to the fire."

"He'd carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves."

"The world shrinking down about a core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality."

"Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

"Watching while they opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and mattock and brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in number. Collected there for a common warmth. The dull tubes of them beginning to move sluggishly in the cold hard light. Like the bowels of some great beast exposed to the day. The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they concieved it to be. The burning snakes twisted horribly and some crawled burning across the floor of the grotto to illuminate its darker recesses. As they were mute there were no screams of pain and the men watched them burn and writhe and blacken in just such silence hemselves and they disbanded in silence in the winter dusk each with his own thoughts to go home to their suppers."

"They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribsof fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless."

"He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt."

"Are you brave?
Just medium.
What's the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat into the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.
Really?
No. Dont listen to me. Come on, let's go."

"He cried for a long time. I'll talk to you every day, he whispered. And I wont forget. No matter what. Then he rose and turned and walked back out to the road."

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polsiehd and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."  

Tags: quotes

"I am an impregnable little boy."

"Do I by crushing everything that he is deprive him of a final knowing?"

"'Eyes, eyes, eyes,' said the elderly man. 'Your Father must have been a peacock to have had so many eyes!'"

"Soon my sack was red with drops of wine and grease from where I'd rested it on the board.

I stood when finished, making certain no goblet had escaped. I had them all. I studied the dead men - my sleeping red-haired Martino, his face on the bare marble in a puddle of the slopped wine, and Francisco, from whose head did leak a small bit of darkened blood.

The flies buzzed and droned over this blood as they did over the grease pooled around the remnants of the roasted pig. A battalion of little black beetles had come, most common in Venice, for they are carried by the water, and it made its way over the table, towards Martino's face.

A quiet warming light came in through the open doorway. The mornng had come.

With one sweeping glance that imprinted in my mind the details of this scene for all time, I went out and home."

Tags: quotes

"Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake."

"'They couldn't feed themselves, because they couldn't get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!' 'They starved?' 'They fed each other! That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!'"

"'Fuck you!' 'Excuse me!' 'Sorry. I mean, screw you.' 'You need a time-out!' 'I need a mausoleum!'" 

"Shyness is when you turn away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want."

Tags: quotes

"Santa, huh? And you wouldn't happen to spell that S-A-N-T-A, would you?"
"Yes, I would. That's exactly how I'd spell it."
"That's what I figured. Now rearrange the letters a little bit, and what do you have? S-A-T-A-N, that's what. You're the goddamn devil, grandpa, and the only place you exist is in my mind."

"Don't tell me that two and two is four," Willy said to his mother when he returned to Brooklyn. "How do we know that two is two? That's the real question." 

"You want to know what a dog's philosophy of life is, pal? I'll tell you what it is. Just one short sentence: 'If you can't eat it or screw it, piss on it.'" 

Normally the most obliging of creatures, the dog would grow stubborn, distracted, seem o forget his master entirely, and if Willy happened to tug on the leash before Mr. Bones was ready to move on, before he had ingested the full savor of the turd or urine puddle under scrutiny, he would plant his legs to resist the yank, and so unbudgeable did he become, so firmly did he anchor himself to the spot, that Willy often wondered if there wasn't a sac hidden somewhere in his paws that could secrete glue on command. 

"Cure porn with corn", he muttered to himself, pacing back and forth across the dirt floor, "pure corn will cure porn". 

"By way of proof, I offer you the return of O'Dell's Hair Trainer. The stuff disappeared from my life forty years ago, and now, on the last day of my life, it suddenly comes back. I year for profundities, and what I get is this no-account factoid, this microblip on the screen of memory. My mother used to rub it into my hair when I was just a wee thing, a mere mite of a lad. They sold it in the local barbershops, and it came in a clear glass bottle about yea big. The spout was black, I believe, and on the label there was a picture of some grinning idiot boy. A wholesome, idealized numbskull with perfectly groomed hair. Now cowlicks for that lunkhead, no wobbles in the part for that pretty fellow. I was five, six years old, and every morning my mother would give me the treatment, hoping to make me look like his twin brother. I can still hear the gloppity-gluggity sound as the goo came out of the bottle. It was a whitish, translucent liquid, sticky to the touch. A kind of watered-down sperm, I suppose, but who knew about such things then? They probably manufactured it by hiring teenage boys to jerk off into vats. Thus are fortunes made in our great land. A penny to produce, a dollar to buy, and you figure out the rest. So my Polish mother would scrub the O'Dell's Hair Trainer into my scalp, comb my disobedient locks, and then send me off to school looking like that ass-wipe kid on the bottle. I was going to be an American, by gum, and this hair meant that I belonged, that my parents knew what was fucking what." 

"That's American know-how for you. It keeps coming at you, and every minute there's new junk to push out the old junk. You'd think we would have caught on by now, wised up to the tricks they pull on us, but people can't get enough of it. They cheer, they wave flags, they hire marching bands." 

"Patriotism has its role, but in the long run it's a sentiment best kept under wraps. Yes, we Yanks have given he world the zipper and the Zippo, not to speak of zip-a-dee doo-dah and Zeppo Marx, but we're also responsible for the H-bomb and the hula hoop. It all balances out in the end, doesn't it?" 

"The transparent toaster, comrade. It came to me in a vision two or three nights ago, and my head's been full of the idea ever since. Why not expose the works, I said to myself, be able to watch the bread turn from white to golden brown, to see the metamorphosis with your own eyes? What good does it do to lock up the bread and hide it behind that ugly stainless steel? I'm talking about clear glass, with the orange coils glowing within. It would be a thing of beauty, a work of art in every kitchen, a luminous sculpture to contemplate even as we go about the humble task of preparing breakfast and fortifying ourselves for the day ahead. Clear, heat-resistant glass. We could tint it blue, tint it green, tint it any color we like, and then, with the orange radiating from within, imagine the combinations, just think of the visual wonders that would be possible. Making toas would be turned into a religious act, an emanation of otherworldliness, a form of prayer. Jesus God." 

"But man does not live by words alone. He needs bread, and not just one loaf, but two. One for the pocket and one for the mouth. Bread to buy bread, if you see what I mean, and if you don't have the first kind, you sure as hell aren't going to have the other." 

"A few more minutes to catch my breath. Then we'll see. Or not see. And if we don't, then there'll be nothing but darkness. Darkness everywhere, as far as the eye can't see. Even down to the sea, to the briny depths of nothingness, where no things are nor will ever be. Except me. Except not me. Except eternity." 

"You walk around with a load of nitroglycerin in your brain, and sooner or later you're going to bump into something. When it comes right down to it, it's a wonder you didn't blow yourself up a long time ago." 

"But the truth is, friend, that dogs can read. Why else would they put those signs on the doors of post offices? NO DOGS ALLOWED EXCEPT FOR SEEING-EYE DOGS. Do you catch my meaning? The man with the dog can't see, so how can he read the sign? And if he can't read it, who else is left? That's what they do in those Seeing-Eye schools. They just dont' tell us. They've kept it a secret, and by now it's one of the three or four best-kept secrets in America. For good reason, too. If word got out, just think of what would happen. There'd be riots in the streets, they'd burn down the White House, mayhem would rule. In three months, dogs would be pressing for their independence. Delegations would convene, negotiations would begin, and in the end' they'd settle the thing by giving up Nebraska, South Dakota, and half of Kansas. They'd kick out the human population and let the dogs move in, and from then on the country would be divided in two. The United States of People and the Independent Republic of Dogs. Good Christ, how I'd love to see that. I'd move there and work for you, Mr. Bones. I'd fetch your slippers and light your pipe. I'd get you elected prime minister. Anything you want, boss, and I'd be your man." 

"That's it," she would say. "I'm on vacation." According to this usage, the word seemed to be a synonym for sofa, or perhaps it was simply a more elegant way to describe the act of sitting down.

Tags: quotes

"The laughter had to be gross or it would turn to sobs, and to sob would be to realize, and to realize would be to despair. So the noise poured forth like a jazzed-up fugue, louder and louder to cover the whisper in every man's soul."

Tags: quotes

"There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness."

Tags: quotes