Except Quotes (page 11)
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Dear Blubbo, How is it going? It is fine here. My sisters are fine. Mom is usual. Everything is regular in life except I am still seeing the burning skull heads. Yesterday Mom took me to Sears for school clothes. I told my sisters I could see the people's head bones. They said DO NOT tell Mom. A guy moved a trailer onto the empty lot by our house. His skull is spectacular, many colors glowing.
Lynda Barry
Every man that ever lived craved perfect happiness, the detective poignantly reflected. But how can we have it when we know we’re going to die? Each joy was clouded by the knowledge it would end. And so nature had implanted in us a desire for something unattainable? No. It couldn’t be. It makes no sense. Every other striving implanted by nature had a corresponding object that wasn’t a phantom. Why this exception? the detective reasoned. It was nature making hunger when there wasn’t any food....
William Peter Blatty
A lot of that, "Have you ever noticed that [specific Florida player] is like the [dated cultural reference] version of [obscure player from the middle 1980s] except that his [some ridiculous stoner concept about grizzly bears] has been filtered through the political ideology of [random indie artist currently on tour with Built to Spill]?" We all have to pay the rent, rockers. I know who I am.
Chuck Klosterman
There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . . survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.
Betty Smith
My vantage point must have been somewhere between our little house and the steamer jetty. The sea was exceptionally calm. Lit up by a sun that you could have taken down and put in your knapsack. Everything: Mooring rings on the harbor wall, piles of timber, the arches of the houses, caiques, windows? all of them were faithful, in the way we describe a dog being faithful.
Giorgos Seferis
For the city, his city, stood unchanging on the edge of time: the same burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowers rusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for four centuries except a slow aging among withered laurels and putrefying swamps. In winter sudden devastating downpours flooded the latrines and turned the streets into sickening bogs. In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.
Jonathan Lethem
you said Is
there anything which
is dead or alive more beautiful
than my body, to have in your fingers
(trembling ever so little)?
Looking into
your eyes Nothing, i said, except the
air of spring smelling of never and forever.
.... and through the lattice which moved as
if a hand is touched by a
hand(which
moved as though
fingers touch a girl's
breast,
lightly)
Do you believe in always, the wind
said to the rain
I am too busy with
my flowers to believe, the rain answered
E. E. Cummings
