"I can feel the stuff I don't say rotting inside me like mildewy spuds in a sack." - Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

"Eavesdropping's sort of thrilling 'cause you learn what people really think, but eavesdropping makes you miserable for exactly the same reason." - Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

"Jesus, I envy anyone who can say what they want at the same time as they think it, without needing to test it for stammer-words." - Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

"Dead things show you what you'll be too one day." - Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

"When people listen they make a listening noise." - Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

"I always say the revolution you think you're fighting for is not the revolution you're going to win. At the same time, if you fight with passion and urgency, you will enact revolutions somewhere." - Angela Davis in Vocabulary of Change video

"With the assault on immigrant rights, with the continued heterosexism, with issues of environmental justice, I think the challenge of the 21st century is to try to figure out how all of these things connect." - Angela Davis in Vocabulary of Change video

"I think the statistics you shared with us indicate how important it is for us today to try to bring the issues together. We can't simply think about one issue separately. Unemployment - unemployment in black communities and Native American communities - we have to recognize the connection with the wars that are going on." - Angela Davis in Vocabulary of Change video

"Our redemption comes from the struggle itself... It is in the effort, the striving for equality and freedom that we become human." - Tim Wise in Vocabulary of Change video

"As isolated individuals we will always be powerless... But as communities we can achieve anything." - Angela Davis in Vocabulary of Change video

"As much as I always warn against unproductive nostalgia, I do think it is important to have historical memory." - Angela Davis in Vocabulary of Change video

"We tend to assume that having high self-esteem is a good thing, but some psychologists have long suspected that there might be something wrong with the whole notion - because it rests on the assumption of a unitary, easily identifiable self. Setting out to give your 'self' one universal positive rating may in fact be deeply perilous. The problem lies in the fact that you're getting into the self-rating game at all; implicitly, you're assuming that you are a single self that can be given a universal grade. When you rate your self highly, you actually create the possibility of rating your self poorly; you are reinforcing the notion that your self is something that can be 'good' or 'bad' in the first place. And this will always be a preposterous overgeneralisation. You have strengths and weaknesses; you behave in good ways and bad ways. Smothering all these nuances with a blanket notion of self-esteem is a recipe for misery. Inculcate high self-esteem in your children, claims Paul Hauck, a psychologist opposed to the concept of self-esteem, and you will be 'teaching them arrogance, conceit and superiority' - or alternatively, when their high self-esteem falters, 'guilt, depress, and feelings of inferiority and insecurity' instead. Better to drop the generalisations. Rate your individual acts as good or bad, if you like. Seek to perform as many good ones, and as few bad ones, as possible. But leave your self out of it." - Oliver Burkeman in "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking"

"The optimism-focused, goal-fixated positive-thinking approach to happiness is exactly the kind of thing the ego loves. Positive thinking is all about identifying with your thoughts, rather than disidentifying from them. And the 'cult of optimism' is all about looking forward to a happy or successful future, thereby reinforcing the message that happiness belongs to some other time than now. Schemes and plans for making things better fuel our dissatisfaction with the only place where happiness can ever be found - the present." - Oliver Burkeman in "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking"

"Perhaps there is no deeper, truer meaning to the notion of who we are. Once again, though, this isn't a question that we need to answer conclusively. Merely asking it is what matters. It is enough, for now, to enquire within: don't you feel a certain tranquility when you seek to become the witness to your thoughts, rather than identifying with them completely?" - Oliver Burkeman in "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking"

"...what motivates our investment in goals and planning for the future, much of the time, isn't any sober recognition of the virtues of preparation and looking ahead. Rather, it's something much more emotional: how deeply uncomfortable we are made by feelings of uncertainty. Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more fiercely in our preferred visions of that future - not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present." - Oliver Burkeman in "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking"

"The Everest climbers, Kayes suspected, had been lured into destruction by their passion for goals. His hypothesis was that the more they fixated on the endpoint - a successful summiting of the mountain - the more that goal became not just an external target but a part of their own identities, of their senses of themselves as accomplished guides or high-achieving amateurs. If his hunch about the climbers was right, it would have become progressively more difficult for them to sacrifice their goal, despite accumulating evidence that it was becoming a suicidal one. Indeed, that accumulating evidence, Kayes was convinced, would have hardened the climbers' determination not to turn back. The climb would have become a struggle not merely to reach the summit, but to preserve their sense of identity. In theology, the term theodicy refers to the effort to maintain belief in a benevolent god, despite the prevalence of evil in the world; the phrase is occasionally used to describe the effort to maintain any belief in the face of contradictory evidence. Borrowing that language, Chris Kayes terms the syndrome he had identified goalodicy." - Oliver Burkeman in "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking"

"Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work." - Chuck Close, as quoted by Oliver Burkeman in "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking"

"It is illuminating to note, here, how the daily rituals and working routines of prolific authors and artists - people who really do get a lot done - very rarely include techniques for 'getting motivated' or 'feeling inspired'. Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasise the mechanics of the working process, focusing not on generating the right mood... Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones." - Oliver Burkeman in "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking"

"Taking a non-attached stance towards procrastination, by contrast, starts from a different question: Who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway." - Oliver Burkeman in "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking"

"To know that I am nothing, that is wisdom; to know that I am everything, that is love and in between these two life moves." - North African proverb

"By crowding inequality off the public agenda, racecraft has stranded this country again and again over its history. It may do so again, permitting an economic sickness that arose from inequality to be treated homeopathically by further doses of inequality, which may eventually provoke rage that will sweep away respect for democratic politics and for the rule of law. Forestalling that calamity is our duty. The first and fundamental step in that direction is to observe racecraft in action, study its moves, listen to its language, and root it out. Only after doing so will we be prepared for the still harder work of tackling inequality. Are we up for it?" - from Racecraft by Karen Fields & Barbara Fields

"... if the imagination expended in devices to restrict high-quality education to a privileged few - coaches, consultants, ghost writers for college application essays, even (God save the mark) test prep courses for a kindergarten entrance exam - were devoted instead to repairing our dilapidated system of public education, fifteen-year-olds in the United States might not rank fifteenth out of twenty-nine OECD countries in reading literacy, twenty-first out of thirty in scientific literacy, and twenty-fifth out of thirty in mathematics literacy." - from Racecraft by Karen Fields & Barbara Fields

"If we build that religion of humanity as we should, there will be strong opposition to all that threatens our common faith. 'If every enterprise directed against the rights of an individual revolts [us], it is not only by sympathy with the victim, neither is it for fear of having to suffer like injustices [ourselves]. It is that such attacks cannot go on with impunity without compromising the nation's existence.' I think sociology can enable us to bring that about. With it, we can uncover the profound dynamics of social life that make the social world we see before our eyes." - from Racecraft by Karen Fields & Barbara Fields, featuring Emile Durkheim in L'Individualisme

"Both argues in word and deed not only that reform in the land of his birth was possible, but also that the scientific investigation of social life provided the would-be reformer of that land with tools." - from Racecraft by Karen Fields & Barbara Fields

"Nothing is more fully agreed than the certainty that memory fails. Memory fails, leaving blanks, and memory collaborates with forces separate from actual past events, forces such as an individual's wishes, a group's suggestions, a moment's connotations, and environment's clues, an emotion's demands, a self's evolution, a mind's manufacture of order, and yes, even a researcher's objectives. In these collaborations, and in others I have not thought of, memory acquires well-noted imperfections. We seek to understand these imperfections systematically if we are scholars of memory, in itself, and we seek to correct for them if we are scholars who use memory as a source. As researchers, we bind ourselves to skepticism about memory and to a definite methodological mistrust of those rememberers who are our informants. We are fully attentive to the fact that memory fails." - from Racecraft by Karen Fields & Barbara Fields

"Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and recreate their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, business enterprise, church, army, club, and so on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand." - from Racecraft by Karen Fields & Barbara Fields

"Facts of nature spawns by the needs of ideology sometimes acquire greater power over people's minds than facts of nature spawned by nature itself."  - from Racecraft by Karen Fields & Barbara Fields

"Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations - as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco. One historian has gone so far as to call slavery 'the ultimate segregator.' He does not ask why Europeans seeking the 'ultimate' method of segregating Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa. No one dreams of analyzing the struggle of the English against the Irish as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the English developed for suppressing the 'barbarous' Irish later served nearly word for word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and indigenous American Indians. Nor does anyone dream of analyzing serfdom in Russia as primarily a problem of race relations, even though the Russian nobility invented fictions of their innate, natural superiority over the serfs as preposterous as any devised by American racists." - from Racecraft by Karen Fields & Barbara Fields

"My students find it off when I refer to the colonizers of North America as Euro-Americans, but they feel more at ease with Afro-Americans, a term which, for the period of colonization and the slave trade, has no more to recommend it. Students readily understand that no one was really a European, since Europeans belonged to different nationalities: but it comes as a surprise to them that no one was an African either, since Africans likewise belonged to different nationalities." - from Racecraft by Karen Fields & Barbara Fields

"Racism is a qualitative, not a quantitative, evil. Its harm does not depend on how many people fall under its ban but on the fact that any at all do. And the first principle of racism is belief in race, even if the believer does not deduce from that belief that the member of a race should be enslaved or disfranchised or shot on sight by trigger-happy police officers or asked for identification when crossing the campus of the university where he teachers, just as believing that the sun travels around the earth is geocentrism, whether or not one deduces from the belief that persons affirming the contrary should be hauled before an inquisition and forced to recant. Once everyone understand that African descent is not race and that African ancestry differs from others only in the racism with which Euro-America has stigmatized it, the problem changes: what is needed is not a more varied set of words and categories to represent racism but a politics to uproot it." - from Racecraft by Karen Fields & Barbara Fields

"Whether called assimilation or amalgamation, the goal of blending in the discordant element operates on the rationale rather than on the problem. Framing questions in those terms guarantees that the answers will remain entangled in racist ideology." - from Racecraft by Karen Fields & Barbara Fields

"Tolerance thus bases equal rights on benevolent patronization rather than democratic first principles, much as a parent's misguided plea that Jason 'share' the swing or seesaw on a public playground teaches Jason that his gracious consent, rather than another child's equal claim, determines the other child's access." - from Racecraft by Karen Fields & Barbara Fields

"Even language can be squeezed into the glass slipper of race by a sufficiently ruthless pruning of the foot. According to believers in something known as 'black English,' the deep structures of African languages - in other words, the speakers' African-ness - accounts for the speech habits of Afro-Americans. But African linguistic structures cannot explain why, despite the much greater survival of Africanisms in Jamaican creole, the children of Jamaican migrants to Britain do not speak 'black English'; instead, they speak English as white Britons of their class and region do. (Nor can such structures explain why there is no such thing as black French, black Portuguese, or black Spanish.) The speech patterns of Afro-Americans testify not to the greater strength of African linguistic survivals among Afro-Americans as compared to Afro-Caribbean migrants in Britain but to the greater prevalence and rigidity of segregated schooling, housing, and sociability, especially among the working class, in the United States, as compare to Britain. Racism, in other words, not race." - from Racecraft by Karen Fields & Barbara Fields

" '... only as you gasp your drying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!' Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"  - Adam Ewing in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity. My thoughts flow thus. Scholars discern motions in history and formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises and falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts and virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief. Belief is both prize and battlefield, within the mind and in the mind's mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation and bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being and history's Horrozes, Boerhaaves and Gooses shall prevail. You and I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage and our legacy? Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this: - one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the doom written without our nature? If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth and claw, if we believe divers races and creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable and the riches of the Earth and its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword." - Adam Ewing in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"My head is a Roman candle of invention. Lifetime's music, arriving all at once. Boundaries between noise and sound are conventions, I see now. All boundaries are conventions, national ones too. One may transcend any convention, if only one can first conceive of doing so." - Robert Frobisher in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Because she makes me think about something other than myself... Because I, only I, see her smile a fraction before it reaches her face." - Robert Frobisher in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Took in view from other side, trying to wind in all unraveled strings of myself." - Robert Frobisher in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

" 'When a man aspires to power, I ask one simple question: Does he think like a businessman?' Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. 'I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?'" - Luisa Rey in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Funny, thinks Milton. Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible." - Milton in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction - in short, belief - grows ever 'truer.' The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent / expose as fraudulent.

The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of free will. Power seeks + is the right to 'landscape' the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.)

Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future, too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up - a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone.

Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacraum of smoke, mirrors + shadows - the actual past - from another such simulacrum - the actual future?>

One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each 'shell' (the present) encased inside a nest of 'shells' (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of 'now' likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future." - Isaac Sachs in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young, ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds." - Timothy Cavendish in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured." - Timothy Cavendish in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

" 'We - by whom I mean anyone over sixty - commit two offences just by existing. Once is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight." - Veronica Costello in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Rights are susceptible to subervsion, as even granite is susceptible to erosion. My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only 'rights,' the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful." - Sonmi-451 in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Well, their food came from the forest and gardens, water from the cataract. Scavenge trips to landfills yielded plastics and metals for tools. Their "school" sony was powered by a water turbine. Solar nitelamps recharged during daylite hours. Their entertainment was themselves; consumers cannot xist without 3-D and AdV, but humans once did and still can. Enforcement? Problems arose, no doubt, even crises from time to time. But no crisis is unsuperable if people cooperate." - Sonmi-451 in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

" 'Fantasy. Lunacy.' All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities." - Sonmi-451 in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"All rising suns set, Archivist. Our corpocracy now smells of senility." - Sonmi-451 in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Every conurb, my guide answered, has a chemical toilet where the city's unwanted human waste disintegrates quietly, but not quite invisibly. It motivates the downstrata: "Work, spend, work," say slums like Huamdonggil, "or you, too, will end your life here." Moreover, entrepreneurs take advantage of the legal vaccuum to erect ghoulish pleasurezones for upstrata bored with more respectable quarters." - Sonmi-451 in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds." - Zachry in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"I don't know why it is, but secrets jus' rot you like teeth if you don't yank 'em out." - Zachry in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Yay, I will, again, an' yay, we will, again." - Kolekole girl in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true." - Meronym  in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Yay, Old Uns' Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an' made miracles ord'nary, but it din't master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o' humans, yay, a hunger for more... Oh, more gear, more food, faster speeds, longer lifes, easier lifes, more power, yay. Now the Hole World is big, but it weren't big 'nuff for that hunger what made Old Uns rip out the skies an' boil up the seas an' poison soil with crazed atoms an' donkey 'bout with rotted seeds so new plagues was borned an' babbits was freak-birthed. Fin'ly, bit'ly, then quicksharp, states busted into barb'bric tribes an' the Civ'lize Days ended, 'cept for a few folds'n'pockets here'n'there, where its last embers glimmer." - Meronym  in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"However, corpocracy was emerging and social strata was demarked, based on dollars and, curiously, the quantity of melanin in one's skin." - Sonmi-451 in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners? I said, If losers can xploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term." - Sonmi-451 in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"What was knowledge for, I would ask myself, if I could not use it to better my xistence?... I said something about reading not being knowledge, about knowledge without xperience being food without sustenance." - Sonmi-451 in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

" 'Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror.' " - Profession Mephi in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

" 'What is the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?' " - Profession Mephi in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Their drunkenness had a recklessness that nite..." - Sonmi-451 in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively." - Sonmi-451 in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Snow is bruised lilac in half-lite: such pure solace." - Sonmi-451 in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

" 'Do,' says Luisa finally, 'whatever you can't not do.' " - Luisa Rey in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

" 'The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage. Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, ousted Nixon, and in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam. But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outreach explode into bring. Any stage may be sabotaged. The world's Alberto Grimaldis can fight scrutiny by burying truth in committees, dullness, and misinformation, or by intimidating the scrutinizers. They can extinguish awareness by dumbing down education, owning TV stations, paying 'guest fees' to leader writers, or just buying the media up. The media - and not just The Washington Post - is where democracies conduct their civil wars." - Hester Van Zandt in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Anyway, got a gorgeous passage from the fire - percussion for crackling, alto bassoon for the wood, and a restless flute for the flames. Finished transcribing it this very minute. Air in the chateau clammy like laundry that won't dry. Door-banging drafts down the passageways. Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying good-bye." - Frobisher in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"Really, Sixsmith, you should try to enjoy lovemaking in total silence. All that ballyhooing transmutes into bliss if you'll only seal your lips." - Frobisher in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"If one will just be still, shut up, and listen - lo, behold, the world'll sift through one's ideas for one, esp. in a grimy London railway station." - Frobisher in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself and moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent." - Adam Ewing in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

" 'Embrace your enemy,' the elders urged, 'to prevent him striking you.' " - Adam Ewing in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"It always surprised me how few people I saw in front of the houses in the hills - as if wealth implied closed doors; in the flatlands there were always kids playing, students riding their bikes, people sitting on lawn chairs, walking dogs. Here it was much more quiet, even on a night when carved pumpkins leered from porches and bowls of candy were just inside the doors. There were hardly even any trick-or-treaters in sight." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"This was love without any attachment, therefore without any real risk." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"I loved language but not in moments like this when you couldn't use poetry to explain how you really felt." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"People usually change in small, incremental ways over time. You don't see it overnight, even after a trauma, not usually. People fall apart of fall in love or grow up or die slowly, most of the time. Children's brains take years to develop and diseases usually do, too... Change comes in the way you serve food and water, administer medications, clean up messes, do errands, read the words of masters - prophets and poets - listen to music, listen to each other. It comes in the way you say I love you over and over again, as if you won't be able to say it in the morning, and the way you say I'm sorry as soon as possible after you have hurt the person you love." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"Ghosts haunt every place we go whether we believe in them as apparitions or not, whether they are ghosts or memories." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"Blue kaleidoscope butterflies made a sound like shaken bits of glass and refracted beneath my eyelids." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

" 'In order to have bliss you have to be able to accept all the parts of the other, all the wildness and the darkness. You have to be able to hold on.' He paused. 'I can hold on.' " - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"He came back toward me and my heart beat faster with hope that he'd stay but he just kissed my forehead and said, 'Let me know if you need anything.' Then he was gone before I could him even one of the things I needed from him, let alone list every part of his body and whatever I could retrieve, even briefly, of his soul." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"I slid toward him and took his face in my fingers, brought his mouth to mine. He suddenly seemed to helpless. It scared and excited me; what was this I felt - power? I kiss him harder. He sighed like a girl and whispered my name." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"It seemed as if my organs were right beneath the surface of his hands, that he could almost touch them." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"I kept thinking. This is John Graves here with me. This is his body that contains his brain and his lungs and his heart. This is where his soul lives. This is not just sex; this is us going somewhere together. This is us finding each other. Again." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"In spite of the dream, in spite of everything, a warmth filled my center, like the sun pouring into the room, spreading out through my veins into my fingers and toes." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"Then John Graves pressed his lips to mine and the veils between this world and the others disintegrated in places, like ancient lace, so that I could glimpse through." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"We said good night and the click of the phone echoed down through my body as if I were hollow... Suddenly, as I was putting the last ones in water and sweeping up some stray leaves, I felt it. The crushing mass that I'd been carrying in my chest breaking up into shards. I put a hand to my heart and slumped down on the floor with my back against the bed." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"God damn it... there are nice things in the world - and I mean nice things. We're all such morons to get so sidetracked. Always, always, always referring every goddamn thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos." - Zooey Glass in Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger

"Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So... get on your way." - Dr. Seuss

"I was changing. I was falling apart. Or maybe I was just discovering who I really was." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"It is hard to remember what you first fall in love with. Usually it is an expression in the eyes, an exchange, or a gesture or the sound of a voice, a word spoken. Those things can get blended with the atmosphere around you at the time - a fragrance in the air, a play of light, even music - so that they become almost one with each other and when you see or smell or hear the memories of a place you feel the love again, but as a pang of loss. Sometimes the feelings get connected so deeply to your body that even your own skin, your own eyes in the mirror remind you of what you no longer have." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"Add in the way college isolated you, left you feeling as if the rest of the world, including your past and your family, was just a dream compared to what you read in your books and on the faces of the other students, and anything could happen." - The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

"Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime; and every kindness we birth our future." - Sonmi-451 in Cloud Atlas (the movie)

"A half-finished book is, after all, a half finished love affair." - Robert Frobisher in Cloud Atlas (the movie)

"What is happiness? It's a moment before you need more happiness." - Don Draper in Mad Men 'Commissions and Fees'

'You know, Sometimes I wonder...what home is. Is it an actual place? or is it some kind of longing for something, some kind of connection? You know, i spent my whole life on Caprica. I was born in one house, and then I...I moved to another... and then, this. and then, now. I don't think i've ever felt truly at home until these last few months, here, with you.' - Laura Roslin, Battlestar Galactica: "Islanded In A Stream Of Stars"

'The unstruck music vibrates in all of us.' - Leoben in Battlestar Galactica

'A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forget what that is.'

- Eddard Stark in Game of Thrones by George RR Martin

'If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.' - Eddard Stark in Game of Thrones by George RR Martin

'I apologize if I'm exceedingly formal, but I find it a necessary coping mechanism. You see, I suffer from an embarrassingly mundane affliction that, when unaddressed, results in a shameful lack of manners. I am cursed with burden of always being right.' - Richard Feynman as quoted in Jonathan Hickman's Th eManhattan Projects #2

"The world is too dangerous to live in - not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who sit and let it happen." - Albert Einstein

'Life has a gap in it, it just does. You don't crazy trying to fill it like some lunatic.' - Geraldine in Take This Waltz

'I want to know what you do to me.' - Margot in Take This Waltz

"...it was just her and the fact of being alive, colliding...' - Margot in Take This Waltz

"We were citizens. I mean we, African-Americans, were second-class citizens, but anyway, hopeful people. And then after the war we became consumers. Happiness in acquisition. And now we are only taxpayers. I'm going to give my tax dollars to those people?! If I'm only a taxpayer, I'm very upset. That's a different deal. A citizen has some connection to his neighbourhood, or his state or his country. The taxpayer doesn't." - Toni Morrison in The Guardian, April 14 2012

"Great minds discuss ideas, Average minds discuss events, Small minds discuss people" - Eleanor Roosevelt

"You have two gardens: your own garden and that of your beloved. First, you have to take care of your own garden and master the art of gardening. In each one of us there are flowers and garbage. The garbage is the anger, fear, discrimination, and jealousy within us. If you water the garbage, you will strengthen the negative seeds. If you water the flowers of compassion, understanding, and love, you will strengthen the positive seeds. What you grow is up to you. If you don't know how to practice selective watering in your own garden, then you won't have enough wisdom to help water the flowers in the garden of your beloved. In cultivating your own garden well, you also help to cultivate their garden." - Thich Nhat Hanh in "After the Honeymoon" from Shambhala Sun, Fall 2011

"Providing students with the chance to play a transformative role in their own classrooms may, in turn, give them valuable practice in transforming the larger communities and societies they inhabit." - David Nurenberg in "What does Injustice Have to Do with Me? A Pedagogy of the Privileged" form Harvard Educational Review

"A class where, for example, various small groups of students each read different texts, focusing on the experiences of Americans from different cultural and racial backgrounds (and here the teacher has a vital role in helping students locate such texts), could help students understand the interlocking patterns of privilege and power from multiple sides as everyone comes together and shares..." - David Nurenberg in "What does Injustice Have to Do with Me? A Pedagogy of the Privileged" form Harvard Educational Review

"Suddenly, the cause of racial or social justice is not just something espoused by people of color (and Abraham Lincoln), and the role in the story for people who look like my students is not just that of the oppressor; it is both covictim and coagent of change." - David Nurenberg in "What does Injustice Have to Do with Me? A Pedagogy of the Privileged" form Harvard Educational Review

"We who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people. No one ever seems willing to acknowledge aloud the thorough-going self-interest that underlies all impulses toward economic equality." - David Foster Wallace in "Authority and American usage" from Consider the lobster and other essays

"To teach is not to transfer the comprehension of the object to a student but to instigate the student, who is a knowing subject, to become capable of comprehending and of communicating what has been comprehended." - P. Freire in Pedagogy of Freedom

An old Cherokee told his grandson, "My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies, & ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, & truth." The boy thought about it, and asked, "Grandfather, which wolf wins?" The old man quietly replied, "The one you feed."

"I wish I could organize a trip of Tea Party activists and take them to Haiti, so they could see what happens if they have a country with no government," says Earl Kessler, an urban-disaster consultant for USAID. - Rolling Stone, August 4 2011

"We were told that marijuana would lead to monster babies, and LSD would make you stare at the sun until your eyeballs melted, and a lot of people in my generation, when they found out that those things weren't true, went on to assume that heroin would turn out to be harmless as well, which of course it definitely isn't. Whether drugs are legal or illegal makes absolutely no difference to how dangerous they are." - Alan Moore

"You're talking hundreds of millions of dollars of which it recouped next to nothing. And this is in a world that is falling to bits... Dopey films that are just meant to fill another couple of hours of some over-privileged Western teenager's large empty existence... Can we afford to do films anymore? I know we still will, whether we can afford to or not." - Alan Moore

"I love some American people, but I've got to say that as a nation... they want to grow up. Yes, it was terrible what happened to the Twin Towers, but in the rest of the world we've all been having the shit bombed out of us since Guernica. Digging people out of rubble is kind of business as usual everywhere in the world apart from America." - Alan Moore

"If I write a crappy comic book, it doesn't cost the budget of an emergent Third World nation." - Alan Moore on Hollywood

"If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?" - Jaron Lanier

"When we think that something is going to bring us pleasure, we don’t know what’s really going to happen. When we think something is going to give us misery, we don’t know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don’t know. We never know if we’re going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know." - Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart

"Funny thing: I keep hearing that from the far ends of both sides. 'We want out country back.' Where's it go? If neither side has it, then who took it? Guess what? I did. Me and my big white ancestors. We came rolling in and took it from the people who were here in the first place. And right after we did that, we kidnapped people from Africa to help us build it. And now we're all worried that karma's coming back to bite us on the keister. So we got to fight back because otherwise a hundred years from now, we might be the ones living in reservations and dying of small pox. We can do that. Keep everyone we're afraid of out. Send intruders back where they came from... or maybe put 'em in camps like in World War II, 'cause we're afraid they're terrorists. Or maybe... and it's a crazy idea, I know... maybe we can stop treating everybody like they're the damned enemy." - J. Jonah Jameson

"Says the guy who hates super heroes." - Anti immigrant protestor

"Says the guy who believes that actions have consequences and that there's rules of laws that should protect everyone... even the people we don't like... people who, if you disagree with them, they're not traitors, and if they're new here, maybe they deserve the kind of break we didn't give others. Now: you want to argue facts and figures and impact on the economy? Let's dance. But if you just wanna throw fear and dimwitted slogans at me? Then get out of the way 'cause you're wasting my time." - J. Jonah Jameson

- by Peter David, X-Factor # 217

"When we look around us, we can see that nothing exists in isolation, which is another way of saying that everything is interdependent. Everything depends upon an infinite number of causes and conditions to come into being, arise, and fall away moment by moment. Because they are interdependent, things don’t possess a true existence of their own. For instance, how could we separate a flower from the many causes and conditions that produce it —water, soil, sun, air, seed, and so forth? Can we find a flower that exists independently from these causes and conditions? Everything is so intricately connected, it is hard to point to where one thing starts and another ends. This is what is meant by the illusory or empty nature of phenomena." - Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche, "The Theater of Reflection"

"People change because of identification, not information." - Tina Rosenberg on the Diane Rehm Show (NPR)

“One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.” – Maya Angelou

“My work is based on the assumption that clarity and consistency in our moral thinking is likely, in the long run, to lead us to hold better views on ethical issues.” – Peter Singer

"These self-deceptive patterns allow us to hide in any experience. For example, we can use our religious belief as a place to hide. Rather than becoming more compassionate and considerate, we contort the doctrine into a veil to support our narcissism. We can use any religion to perpetuate deception when we are not relating to its deeper principles." - Sakyong Miphan in 'Confinced by Cowardice,' Shambhala Sun

"Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy." - Chogyam Trungpa

"Yama mara is rooted in the fear of death. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. We want to hold on to what we have. We want every experience to confirm us and congratulate us and make us feel completely together. We say the yama mara is fear of death, but it's actually fear of life. We can turn this arrow into a flower by using the desire to control as a reminder to experience each moment completely new and fresh. We can always return to basic wisdom mind." - Pema Chodron in Comfortable With Uncertainty

"Klesha mara is characterized by strong emotions. Instead of letting feelings be, we weave them into a story line, which gives rise to even bigger emotions. We all use emotions to regain our ground when things fall apart. We can turn this arrow into a flower by using heavy emotion as a way to develop true compassion for ourselves and everyone else." - Pema Chodron in Comfortable With Uncertainty

"Skandha mara has to do with how we try to re-create ourselves when things fall apart. We return to the solid ground of our self-concept as quickly as possible... When things fall apart, instead of struggling to regain our concept of who we are, we can use it as an opportunity to be open and inquisitive about what has just happened and what will happen next. That is how to turn this arrow into a flower." - Pema Chodron in Comfortable With Uncertainty

"Devaputra mara involves seeking pleasure. Any obstacle we encounter has the power to pop the bubble of reality that we have come to regard as secure and certain. When we're threatened that way, we can't stand to feel the edginess, the anxiety, the heat of anger rising, the bitter taste of resentment. Therefore, we reach for whatever we think will blot it out. We try to grasp something pleasant. The way to turn this arrow into a flower is to open our hearts and look at how we try to escape. We can use pleasure-seeking as an opportunity to observe what we do in the face of pain." - Pema Chodron in Comfortable With Uncertainty

"What keeps us unhappy and stuck in a limited view of reality is our tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek security and avoid groundlessness, to seek comfort and avoid discomfort. This is how we keep ourselves enclosed in a cocoon. Out there are all the planets and all the galaxies and vast space, but we're stuck here in this cocoon. Moment after moment, we're deciding that we would rather stay in that cocoon than step out into that big space. Life in our cocoon is cozy and secure. We've gotten it all together. It's safe, it's predictable, it's convenient, and it's trustworthy. If we feel ill at ease, we just fill in those gaps." - Pema Chodron in Comfortable With Uncertainty

"By weaving our opinions, prejudices, strategies, and emotions into a solid reality, we try to make a big deal out of ourselves, out of our pain, out of our problems. But things are not as solid, predictable, or seamless as they seem." - Pema Chodron in Comfortable With Uncertainty

"You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you'll be the guy who'll decide where you'll go. Oh the places you'll go." - Dr. Seuss

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." - Dr. Seuss

"You are you. Now isn't that pleasant?" - Dr. Seuss

"Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So... get on your way." - Dr. Seuss

"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own. You know what you know. You are the guy who'll decide where to go." - Dr. Seuss

"A person's a person no matter how small." - Dr. Seuss

"Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You." - Dr. Seuss

"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

"One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes - I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life." - Frank O'Hara in 'Meditations in an Emergency'


- Posted from my iPad

"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation." - Oscar Wilde


- Posted from my iPad

"If I take a lamp and shine it towards the wall, a bright spot will appear on the wall. The lamp is our search for truth, for understanding. Too often we assume tha thte light on the wall is god, but hte ligth is not the goal of the search, it is the result of the search. The more intense the search, the brighter the light on the wall. The brighter the light on the wall, the greater the sense of revelation upon seeing it. Similarly, someone who does not search, who does not bring a lantern with him, does not see anything. What we perceive as god is the byproduct of the search for god. It may simply be an appreciation of the lgiht, pure and unblemished. Not understanding that it comes from us. Sometimes we stand in front of the light and assume we are the center of the universe, god looks astonighingly like we do. Or we turn to look at our shadow and assume that all is darkness. If we allow ourselves to get in the way, we defeat the purpose, which is to use the light of our search to illuminate the wall and all its beauty and in all its flaws. And in so doing, better understand the world around us." - G'Kar in Babylon 5

"He knows me, but he also loves me, and sometimes the one gets in the way of the other." - D'Lenn in Babylon 5

"They say if you find true love, God has been generous to you. If you don't, it is because he has become one with you." - from Saawariya

"Will you agree to live a life full of hardships with me?" - from Saawariya

"But when I look into her eyes I see the blindness of love. That's the gift. It is not darkness. It is a vision. She sees me in the way whoever is in charge here meant me to be seen. She sees me better than I see myself." - Bodies In Motion and At Rest by Thomas Lynch

"Home is the place that'll catch you when you fall, and we all fall." - Sister Husband in Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts

"We've all got meannes in us... We have some goo in us, too. And the only thing worth living for is the good. That's why we've got to make sure we pass it on." - Novalee Nation in Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts

"Our lives can change with every breath we take." - Novalee Nation in Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts

"Sometimes it seems like we're all living in some kind of prison. And the crime is how much we hate ourselves. It's good to get really dressed up once in a while. And admit the truth: that when you really look closely people are so stranger and so complicated that they're actually... beautiful. Possibly even me." - Angela Chase in My So Called Life

"I've done the merry-go-round, I've been through the revolving door, I feel like I've met someone who I can stand still with. Don't you want to stand still with me?" - Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City

"I had gone so far out on a limb with my feelings, that I didn't realize I was standing there alone." - Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City

"The worst feeling is suddenly realizing that you don't measure up. And that, in the past, when you thought you did, you were a fool." - Angela Chase in My So Called Life

"Love is when you look into someone's eyes, and suddenly, you go all the way inside, to their soul... and you both know, instantly." - Angela Chase in My So Called Life

"So often when we say 'I love you' we say it with a huge 'I' and a small 'you.'" - Antony, Russian Archbishop of England

"Are you seeing planes? Is your name Tatu? Because I swear to go you're living on Fantasy Island!" - Doug Butabi in Night at the Roxbury

"Every straight guy should have a man's tongue in his mouth at least once." - Madonna

"Everyone's a friend, 'till you do 'em, then they're nobody." - Dottie Delgado in Sparkler

"God damn it... there are nice things in the world - and I mean nice things. We're all such morons to get so sidetracked. Always, always, always referring every goddamn thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos." - Zooey Glass in Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger

"That afternoon I dragged my poor tortured soul out to lunch... and attempted to stun it senseless with cosmopolitans." - Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City

"We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible. " - Thomas Merton (1948)

"...curbing addiction would demand that American cultura establish a 'tolerance ofr delay' and 'ultimate goals in life other than sense gratification.' " - from America Anonymous by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

"Yet, whether we were aware of it or not, our entire being had been molded by our failure, or refusal, to solve from within the problems of our real lives: insecurity, loneliness, and lack of any abiding sense of personal worth or dignity. Through sex, charm, emotional appeal, or persuasive intellect, we had used other people as 'drugs,' to avoid facing our own personal inadequacy. " - Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA) from America Anonymous by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

" 'It's about the thinking. It's the fauly thinking that gives us permission. In Al-Anon they say 'My mind is a dangerous neighborhood, I can't go there alone.' And some days, that's really quite true. It is about justification. It isn't that we're maniacs.' " - from America Anonymous by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

"Words have meaning and names have power. The universe began with a word, you know? But which came first. The word or the thought behind the word. You can't create language without thought. And you can't conceive a thought without language. So, which created the other, and thus created the universe?" - Lorien in Babylon 5

"Just stand there in your wrongness and be wrong and get used to it." - President Bartlett in 'The West Wing'

"I was running away. Same as I've always done... I ran away. I realized that I always defined myself in terms of what I wasn't.  I wasn't a good soldier like my father, I wasn't the job, I wasn't a good prospect for marriage or kids. Always what I wasn't. Never what I was. But when you do that you miss the moments. And the moments are all we've got." - Dr. Franklin in Babylon 5.

"If you get near a point, make it." - Ivanova in Babylon 5

"We believe that the Universe itself is conscious in a way we could never truly understand. It is engaged in a search for meaning. So it breaks itself apart, investing its own consciousness in every form of life. We are the Universe, trying to understand itself."  - D'Len in Babylon 5

"If I project a beam of light at the wall, you see the light on the wall, but the wall is not the source of the light, it comes in from somewhere else. The soul is also a projection. It does not exist inside us, anymore than the light exists inside the wall. But this shell is the only way we can perceive it." - Lenier in Babylon 5

"She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"She had always secretly reproached him for not loving her enough. He own love she considered above reproach, while his seemed mere condescention."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"They were happy not in spite of their sadness but thanks to it."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Can proximity cause vertigo? It can. When the north pole comes so close as to touch the south pole, the earth disappears and man finds himself in a void that makes his head spin and beckons him to fall."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Holding her tightly in his arms and feeling her body tremble, he thought he could not endure his love."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?"  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"'It is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground,' he said, 'than to send petitions to a president.'"  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"He went off in the best of moods, trying to fix her essence in his memory, to reduce that memory to a chemical formula capable of defining her uniqueness (her millionth part dissimilarity)."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"What is unique about the 'I' hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual 'I' is what differs from common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the more of an inducement to revolt." - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of quesstions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"...that perverse need one has to expose one's ruins, one's ugliness, to parade one's misery, to uncover the stump of one's amputated arm and force the whole world to look at it." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"...fidelity gave a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"...fidelity gave a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatability: he was strong and she was weak... But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"She realized that she belonged among the weak, in the camp of the weak, in the country of the weak, and that she had to be faithful to them precisely because they were weak and gasped for breath in the middle of sentences. She felt attracted by their weakness as by vertigo. She felt attracted by it because she felt weak herself." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"She was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"We can never know what to want, becayse, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"...and to those of you out there on the front lines, at the polling stations, exercising your rights... and getting shit on as a result, know that your voices were heard. You bled, we all bled. We as a community cried out for some change, for a chance, for a moment to speak... Your voices, the beating heart of our community, for the first time... we drowned out this war!" - Parco Delgado in DMZ # 34 by Brian Wood.

“I can only conclude that I'm paying off karma at a vastly accelerated rate.” - Ivanona in Babylon 5

“There is always choice. We say there is no choice only to comfort ourselves with the decision we have already made.” - Lady Morella in Babylon 5

“The heart does not recognize boundaries on a map, or wars, or political policies. The heart does as the heart does.” - Delenn in Babylon 5

“Our thoughts form the universe. They always matter.” - G'Kar in Babylon 5

"Love makes promise you have to keep." - Francine in Strangers with Paradise by Terry Moore

"Before you gave me your sweater I don't think I realized it was cold." - in Margot at the Wedding.

"She had normal morphology. She loved that word. But what's inside the form and structure? The mind and soul, hers and everyone's, keep dreaming toward something unreachable. Does this mean there's something there, at the limits of matter and energy, a force responsible in some way for the very nature, the vibrancy of our lives from the mind out, the mind in little pigeon blinks that extend the plane of being, out beyond logic and intuition." - Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'

" 'But then there's this other thing and that's the family. This is the point I want to make, that we need to stay together, keep the family going. Just us, three of us, long-term, under the same roof, not every day of the year or every month but with the idea that we're permanent. Times like these, the family is necessary." - Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'

" 'But then there's this other thing and that's the family. This is the point I want to make, that we need to stay together, keep the family going. Just us, three of us, long-term, under the same roof, not every day of the year or every month but with the idea that we're permanent. Times like these, the family is necessary." - Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'

"She wasn't sure why she was looking so intently. She was passing beyond pleasure into some kind of assimilation. She was trying to absorb what she saw, take it home, wrap it around her, sleep in it. There was so much to see. Turn it into living tissue, who you are." - Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'

"He had to learn how to see it correctly, find a crack in the world where it might fit." - Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'

"But then she might be wrong about what was ordinary. Maybe nothing was. Maybe there was a deep fold in the grain of things, the way things pass through the mind, the way time swings in the mind, which it eh only place it meaningfully exists." - Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'

"She wanted to absorb everything, childlike, the dust of stray sensation, whatever she could breathe in from other people's pores. She used to think she was other people. Other people have truer lives." - Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'

"She listened to what he said and let him know she was listening, mind and body, because listening is what would save them this time, keep them from falling into distortion and rancor." - Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'

"The world changes first in the mind of the man who wants to change it." - Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'

" 'I've forgotten how to talk to you. This is the longest talk we've had.'
'You did it better than anybody. Talk to me. Maybe that was the problem.'
'I guess I've unlearned it. Because I sit here thinking we have much to say.'
'We don't have so much to say. We used to say everything, all the time. We examined everything, all the questions, all the issues.'
'All right.'
'It practically killed us.'
'All right. But is it possible? Here's my question,' she said. 'Is it possible you and I are done with conflict? You know what I mean. The everyday friction. The every-word every-breath scheduled we were on before we split. Is it possible this is over? We don't need this anymore. We can live without it. Am I right?'
'We're ready to sink into our little lives,' he said." - Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'

"He used to want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself drifting into spells of reflection, thinking not in clear units, hard and linked, but only absorbing what comes, drawing things out of time and memory and into some dim space that bears his collected experience." - Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'

"Disbelief was the line of travel that led to clarity of thought and purpose. Or was this simply another form of superstition? She wanted to trust in the forces and processes of the natural world, this only, perceptible reality and scientific endeavor, men and women alone on earth. She knew there was no conflict between science and God. Take one with the other. But she didn't want to. There were the scholars and philosophers she'd studied in school, books she'd read as thrilling dispatches, personal, making her shake at times, and there was the sacred art she'd always loved. Doubters created this work, and ardent believers, ad those who'd doubted and then believed, and she was free to think and doubt and believe simultaneously. But she didn't want to. God would crowd her, make her weaker. God would be a presence that remained unimaginable. She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she'd held for much of her life." - Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'

" 'Forget God. These are matters of history. This is politics and economics. All the things that shape lives, millions of people, dispossessed, their lives, their consciousness.' " - Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'

"In the movie version, someone would be in the building, an emotionally damaged woman or a homeless old man, and there would be dialogue and close-ups." - Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'

"Yes, I know that love is unconditional. But I also know it can be unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, unbearable, and strangely easy to mistake for loathing." - Yvaine in Stardust

Soren Kierkegaard - "Twaddle, rubbish, and gossip is what people want, not action... The secret of life is to chatter freely about all one wishes to do and how one is always being prevented - and then do nothing."

Soren Kierkegaard - "Twaddle, rubbish, and gossip is what people want, not action... The secret of life is to chatter freely about all one wishes to do and how one is always being prevented - and then do nothing."

Endgame Volume I: The Problem of Civilization by Derrick Jensen - "We have all been born into a world of wounds, a world being murdered, and we simply don't know what it would be like to be beneficial and welcome partners in the ongoing creation that is the daily life of a forest, river, mountain, desert, and so on."

Sengtsan - "The more talking and thinking, the farther from the truth."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn - "We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable."

Planck - "[A] new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

Gringo Stars - "Hope is the real killer. Hope is harmful. Hope enables us to sit still in the sinking raft instead of doing something about our situation. Forget hope. Honestly and candidly assessing the situation as it truly stands is our only change. Instead of sitting there and 'hoping' our way out of this, perhaps we should recognize that realizing the truth of our situation, even if unpleasant, is positive since it is the required first step toward real change."

Gringo Stars - "Hope is the real killer. Hope is harmful. Hope enables us to sit still in the sinking raft instead of doing something about our situation. Forget hope. Honestly and candidly assessing the situation as it truly stands is our only change. Instead of sitting there and 'hoping' our way out of this, perhaps we should recognize that realizing the truth of our situation, even if unpleasant, is positive since it is the required first step toward real change."

Endgame Volume I: The Problem of Civilization by Derrick Jensen - "...our truth is still there - all of it is still there. We could wake up any time and reclaim the whole of our existence."

"Your right to swing your fist stops where my nose begins." - Zachariah Chaffee

Wislawa Szymborska in Possibilities - "I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries that can be celebrated every day."

Benjamin Franklin - "There never was a good war or a bad peace."

Benjamin Franklin - "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Martin Luther King, Jr. - "Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missles and misguided man."

Martin Luther Kin, Jr. - "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom."

Alan Moore in The Mirror of Love -
"While life endures we'll love,
and afterwards,
if what they say is true,
I'll be refused a Heaven
crammed with popes,
policemen, fundamentalists,
and burn instead,
quite happily,
with Sappho, Michelangelo
and you, my love.

I'd burn throughout eternity
with you."

Carrie Bradshaw in Sex And The City - "I'm looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other love."

Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda - "There are three kinds of bad habits which we use over and over when confronted with unusual life situations. First, we may disregard what's happening or has happened and feel as if it had never occurred. That one is the bigot's way. Second, we may accept everything at its fact value and feel as if we know what's going on. That's the pious man's way. Third, we may become obsessed with an event because either we cannot disregard it or we cannot accept it wholeheartedly. That's the fool's way... There is a fourth, the correct one, the warrior's way. A warrior acts as if nothing had ever happened, because he doesn't believe in anything, yet he accepts everything at its face value. He accepts without accepting and disregards without disregarding. He never feels as if he knows, neither does he feel as if nothing had ever happened. He acts as if he is in control, even though he might be shaking in his boots. To act in such a manner dissipates obsession."

Wicked by Gregory Maguire - "People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of."

Wicked by Gregory Maguire - "There is no difference... The strands are the same, the skeins are the same; the rock remembers; the water has memory; the air has a past for which it can be held accountable; the flame renews itself like a pfenix. What is an animal, but made of rock and water and fire and ether!"

Wicked by Gregory Maguire - "There was too much to hate in this world, and too much to love."

Wicked by Gregory Maguire - "Or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you are ready to see it anew?"

Wicked by Gregory Maguire - "Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn't rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled... it is Art. One might in fact call it the Superior, or the Finest, Art. It bypasses the Fine Arts of painting and drama and recitation. It doesn't pose or represent the world. It becomes."

Tales of Power by Carlos Castenada - "Whenever the [internal] dialogue stops, the world collapses and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been kept heavily guarded by our words. You are like you are, because you tell yourself that you are that way."

Tales of Power by Carlos Castenada - "To turn that magnificence out there into reasonableness doesn't do anything for you. Here, surrounding us, is eternity itself. To engage in reducing it to a manageable nonsense is petty and outright disastrous."

Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda - "I've told you that the internal dialogue is what grounds us... the world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about its being such and such or so and so."

Baby Be-Bop by Francesca Lia Block - "Stories are like genies, Dirk thought. They can carry us into and through our sorrows. Sometimes they burn, sometimes they dance, sometimes they weep, sometimes they sing. Like genies, everyone has one. Like genies, sometimes we forget that we do. Our stories can set us free, Dirk thought. When we set them free."

Baby Be-Bop by Francesca Lia Block - " 'Think about the word destory,' the man said. 'Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That's re-story. Do you know that only two things have been proven to help survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is touching. It sets you free.' "

Baby Be-Bop by Francesca Lia Block - "All his ancestors' stories were also his own. Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us."

Missing Angel Juan by Francesca Lia Block - "Do you know when they say soul-mates? Everybody uses it in personal ads. 'Soul-mate wanted.' It doesn't mean too much now. But soul-mates - think about it. When your soul - whatever that is anyway - something so alive when you make music or love and so mysteriously hidden most of the rest of the time, so colorful and big but without color or shape - when your soul find another soul it can recognize even before the rest of you knows about it. The rest of you just feels sweaty and jumpy at first. And your souls get married even without meaning to - even if you can't be together for some reason in real life, your souls just go ahead and make the wedding plans. A soul's wedding must be too beautiful to even look at. It must be blinding. It must be like all the weddings in the world - gondolas with canopies of doves, champagne glasses shattering, wings of veils, drums beating, flutes and trumpets, showers of roses. And after that happens you know - that's it, this is it. But sometimes you have to let that person go. When you're little, people, movies and fairy tales all tell you that one day you're going to meet this person. So you keep waiting and it's a lot harder than they make it sound. Then you meet and you think, okay, nowe we can just get on with it but you find out that sometimes your soul brother partner lover has other ideas about that. They want to go to New York and write their own songs or whatever. They feel like you don't really love them but the idea of them, the dream you've had since you were a kid about a panther boy to carry you out of the forest of your fear or an angel to make love and celestial music with in the clouds or a genie twin to sleep with you inside a lamp. Which doesn't mean they're not the one. It just means you've got to do whatever you have to do for you alone. You've got to believe in your magic and face right up to the mean nasty part of yourself that wants to keep the one you love locked up in a place in you where no one else can touch them or even see them. Just the way when somebody you love dies you don't stop loving them but you don't lock up their souls inside you. You turn that love into something else, give it to somebody else. And sometimes in a weird way when you do that you get closer than ever to the person who died or the one your sould married."

Missing Angel Juan by Francesca Lia Block - " 'This food helps us write better,' says Mallard. 'We commune better when we aren't digesting animals.' "

Missing Angel Juan by Francesca Lia Block - "But me, maybe I fit in a place like this [New York]. Maybe the cold inside of me will seem less cold in this winter. Maybe the tall buildings will make the brick walls I build for myself seem smaller. Maybe the noises in my head will quiet down in the middle of all the other noises. Or maybe my cold and walls and noise will get worse."

Missing Angel Juan by Francesca Lia Block - "There's the hallway lined with mirrors where I freaked myself once. Now I know they're me but I want to smash my reflections. So in the mirror I'll look like I feel. Pieces. But if you break a mirror there are just more whole little yous in every piece."

Missing Angel Juan by Francesca Lia Block - "I wish I could give you a lamp with a genie in it to make all your wishes come true. But you're a genie. Your own genie. Just believe in that."

Missing Angel Juan by Francesca Lia Block - "We used to lie here hugging with a balloon between us. Angel Juan's body floating on the balloon, his body shining through its skin. Then the balloon popped and we giggled and screamed falling into each other, all the sadness inside of us gone into the air."

Missing Angel Juan by Francesca Lia Block - "My heart is like a teacup covered with hairline cracks. I feel like I have to walk real carefully so it won't get shaken and just all shatter and break."

Missing Angel Juan by Francesca Lia Block - "Our eyelashes brushed like they would weave together by themselves turning us into one wild thing."

Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys by Francesca Lia Block - "If you want to find the trail, if you want to find yourself, you must explore your dreams alone. You must grow at a slow pace in a dark cocoon of loneliness so you can fly like wind, like wings, when you awaken."

Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys by Francesca Lia Block - "It was different. It was light-filled red waves breaking on a beach again and again - a salt-stund fullness. It was being the waves and riding the waves. The bed lifted, the house and the lawn and the garden and the street and the night, one ocean rocking them, tossing them, an ocean of liquid coral roses."

Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys by Francesca Lia Block - "All their lives, Cherokee and Raphael had given each other little kisses, but this kiss was like a wind from the desert, a wind that knocks over candles so that flowers catch fire, a wind, or like a sunset in the desert casting sphinx shadows on the sand, a sunset, or like a shivering in the spine of the earth. They collapsed, their hands sliding down each other's arms."

Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys by Francesca Lia Block - "Let's not be afraid, Cherokee thought. Let's not be afraid of anything that can't really hurt us. She grabbed his wrist and they ran across the street as the red stoplight hand flashed."

Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys by Francesca Lia Block - "There is dirt everywhere, real filth. We should not be able to see air. Air should be like the lenses of our eyes. And the sea... we should be able to swim in the sea; the sea should be like our tears and our sweat - clear and natural for us. There should be animals all around us - not hiding in the poison darkness, watching with their yellow eyes. Look at this city. Look what we have done."

Witch Baby by Francesca Lia Block - "I remembered the way I'd seen the world when I was young. I'd seen the smoke and the pain in the streets, heard the roaring under the earth, felt the rage beneath the surface of everything, most people pretending it wasn't there. Only those who are so shaken or so brave can wear it in their eyes."

Witch Baby by Francesca Lia Block - "Angel Juan belongs anywhere he is... because he knows who he is."

Witch Baby by Francesca Lia Block - "They sprayed each other with the hose, and the water caught sunlight so that they were rinsed in showers of liquid rainbows."

Witch Baby by Francesca Lia Block - "I had been dreaming of him and wishing for him forever. When I met Valentine I wasn't afraid anymore. I knew that my soul would always have a reflection and an echo and that even if we were apart - and we were for a while in the beginning - I finally knew what my soul looked and sounded like. I would have that forever, like a mirror or an echoing canyon."

Witch Baby by Francesca Lia Block - "Dirk and Duck gazed at the ocean. 'How do you hear the water?' Dirk asked Duck."

Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block - "...you are in my blood. I can't help it. We can't be anywhere except together."

Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block - "Love is a dangerous angel."

Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block - " 'I found out yesterday that my friend Bam-Bam is sick. He is really sick. The world is too scary right now. Even though we're okay, how can anyone love anyone when you could kill them just by loving them?' "

Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block - "The Chrysler Building looked like an art-deco rocket that had caught fans of stars on its awy up, and the Statue of Liberty looked like a creature risen green and magical from the sea, and everything looked at peace in the blue, clear day."

Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block - "I saw it on that talk show once. These two gay guys and their best friend all slept together so no one would know for sure whose baby it was. And then they had this really cool little girl and they all raised her, and it was so cool, and when someone in the audience said, 'What sexual preference do you hope she has?' they all go together, they go 'Happiness.' Isn't that cool?"

Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block - " 'They are in love. But even before they were in love they knew they were going to be happy and in love someday. They trusted. They have always loved themselves. They would never hurt themselves.' "

Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block - "A kiss about apple pie a la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate, when you haven't eaten chocolate in a year. A kiss about palm trees speeding by, trailing pink clouds when you drive down the Strip sizzling with champagne. A kiss about spotlights fanning the sky and the swollen sea spilling like tears all over your legs."

Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block - "She knew they were all afraid. But love and disease are both like electricity, Weetzie thought. They are always there - you can't see or smell or hear, touch, or taste them, but you know they are there like a current in the air. We can choose, Weetzie thought, we can choose to plug into the love current instead."

Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block - "I don't know about happily ever after... but I know about happily..."

Cecil B. DeMented by John Waters - "Porno Fans! It's me, Cherish! And I need your hardcore help!"

Cecil B. Demented by John Waters - "That's just it Honey. I'm not gay. I'm straight. And I fucking hate it. Petey loves me and I can't love him back. I've tried. I kiss him and all I feel is whiskers. I can't take that certain thickness in his pants. I'm ashamed of my heterosexuality... I'm straight and I hate, so get used to it!"

Ice by Francesca Lia Block - "Not pain to make you feel for somebody else but pain to make you stop feeling."

Ice by Francesca Lia Block - "...sometimes, after we had made the sheets so hot I was afraid they would stick to our skin like melted wax."

Ice by Francesca Lia Block - "I thought that if I were still crying my tears would freeze and I could give them to him - icicles to suck on. But he needed warming, to be kissed with the fire of a thousand cigarettes."

Ice by Francesca Lia Block - "I loved him the way it feels when you get hot wax on the inside of your wrist and while it's burning, just as sudden, it's a cool thick skin. Like it tastes to eat sweet snow, above the daffodil bulbs - not that I've ever found it, but clean snow that melts to nothing on the heat of your tongue so that you aren't even sure if it was ever there. I loved him like spaniel joy at a scent in the grass - riveted, lost. I loved him so much that it felt as if it had to be taken away from me at any moment, changed - how could something like that be allowed to exist on this earth?"

Ice by Francesca Lia Block - "There is the relief of finally not being alone and the relief of being alone when no one can take anything away from you."

Beast by Francesca Lia Block - "This was the happiest she had ever been in her life, if happiness is waking with a start of joy for the day, feeling each moment in every cell of your being, and going to sleep at night with a mind like a clear moonlit sky."

Bones by Francesca Lia Block - "I tried to speak but the enchantment had seeped into my mouth like choking electric blue frosting from a cake."

Bones by Francesca Lia Block - "If you asked me then if I would have died at that moment I might have said yes. What else was there? This was the closest thing to a story I'd ever known. Inside me it felt like nothing."

Bones by Francesca Lia Block - "He had music blasting from speakers everywhere and I let it take me like when I was at shows, thrashing around, losing the weight of who I was, the self-consciousness and anxiety, to the sound."

Wolf by Francesca Lia Block - "Maybe one night I'll be asleep and I'll feel a hand like a dove on my cheekbone and feel her breath cool like peppermints and when I open my eyes my mom will be there like an angel, saying in the softest voice, When you are born it is like a long, long dream. Don't try to wake up. Just go along until it is over. Don't be afraid. You may not know it all the time but I am with you. I am with you."

Wolf by Francesca Lia Block - "If I had a choice I'd probably like to go to Bali or someplace like that where people are more natural and believe in art and dreams and color and love."

Wolf by Francesca Lia Block - "I really love my mom... What else about her? It's so hard to think of things sometimes, when you're trying to describe somebody so someone else will know. But that's the thing about it - no one can ever know. Basically you're totally alone and the only person in the world who made me feel not completely that way was her because after all we were made of the same stuff."

Charm by Francesca Lia Block - "She went out into the city with its lights like a radioactive phosphorescence, wandered through galleries where the high-priced art on the walls was the same as the garffiti scrawled outside by taggers who were arrested or killed for it..."

Glass by Francesca Lia Block - "...You must reach inside yourselves where I live like a story, not old, not young, laughing at my own sorrow, weeping pearls at weddings, wielding a torch to melt sand into something clear and bright."

Glass by Francesca Lia Block - "Maybe she had not created him, maybe she was his creation and all she dreamed, his dream. Or maybe they had made each other. Yes."

Glass by Francesca Lia Block - "I have heard the stories you tell. You are the one who transforms, who creates. You can go out into the world and show others. They will feel less along because of you, they will feel understood, unburdened by you, awakened by you, freed of guilt and shame and sorrow."

Tiny by Francesca Lia Block - "If they are to prove themselves, they must suffer and die or suffer and survive."

Tiny by Francesca Lia Block - "She was no longer a slow dreamer watching the flowers grow. She was a warrior now. Warriors need something to fight for, though, besides their lives, because otherwise their lives will not be worth it."

Snow by Francesca Lia Block - "She wanted them the way she needed the earth and the flowers and the sky and the sea from her tower room and food and sleep and warmth and light and nights by the fire and poetry and the stories of going out into the world and almost being destroyed by it and returning to find comfort and the real meaning of freak. And I am a freak, she thought, happily. I am meant to stay here forever."

Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Ol' Drippy - "Idle hands spend time at the genitals..."

Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Escape from Leprauchpolis - "He told me to get in the freezer cuz he said there was a carnival in there. There wasn't no carnival, it was a damn freezer. I got freezer burn and i got mushed up against that chicken."

The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving - "He looked like a boy who knew how to drink without getting sick. He had the darkest, brightest eyes, and whenever you looked at him you were sure he'd just been looking at you - but you could never catch him."

Teddy by J.D. Salinger - " 'But doctors talk about cells as if they had such unlimited importance all by themselves. As if they didn't really belong to the person that has them... I grew my own body... Nobody else did it for me. So if I grew it, I must have known how to grow it. Unconsciously, at least. I may have lost the conscious knowledge of how to grow it sometime in the last few hundred thousand years, but the knowledge is still there, because - obviously - I've used it... It would take quite a lot of meditation and emptying out to get the whole thing back - I mean the conscious knowledge - but you could do it if you wanted to. If you opened up wide enough.' "

Teddy by J.D. Salinger - " 'What would you do if you could change the educational system?' he asked ambiguously... 'I know I'm pretty sure I wouldn't start with the things schools usually start with... I think I'd first just assemble all the children together and show them how to meditate. I'd try to show them how to find out who they are, not just what their names are and things like that... I guess, even before that, I'd get them to empty everything their parents and everybody ever told them. I mean even if their parents just told them an elephant's big, I'd make them empty that out. An elephant's only big when it's next to something else - a dog or a lady, for example... I wouldn't even tell them an elephant has a trunk. I might show them an elephant, if I had one handy, but I'd let them just walk up to the elephant not knowing anything more about it than the elephant knew about them. The same thing with grass, and other things. I wouldn't even tell them grass is green. Colors are only names. I mean if you tell them the grass is green, it makes them start expecting the grass to look a certain way - your way - instead of some other way that may be just as good, and maybe much better... I don't know. I'd just make them vomit up every bit of the apple their parents and everybody made them take a bite out of.' 'There's no risk you'd be raising a little generation of ignoramuses?' 'Why? They wouldn't any more be ignoramuses than an elephant is. Or a bird is. Or a tree is... Just because something is a certain way, instead of just behaves a certain way, doesn't mean it's an ignoramus.' "