Saturday, January 16, 2010

more quotes.

"If you wished to see the sky from the towpath you had to look up. Had to lift your head, crane your neck. On their own, your eyes did not naturally discover the sky."

"Nobody wants a heavy-hearted girl for Christ sake."

"History has no existence. All that exists are individuals, and of these, only individual moments as broken off from on another as shattered vertebrae. These words he hand-printed, gripping a pencil clumsily in his stiffening fingers. He had so many thoughts! In the cemetery his head was invaded by hornet-thoughts he could not control.
Clumsily he wrote down these thoughts. He wondered if they were his. He stared at them, and pondered them, then crumpled the paper in his hand and tossed it into the stove."

"...how flimsy, how vulnerable, how merely words were the great works of philosophy! How merely words the dream of mankind for a god!"

"No erotic event exists in isolation, to be experienced merely once, and forgotten. The erotic exists solely in memory: recalled, re-imagined, re-lived, and re-lived in a ceaseless present."

"He was a man of secrets, like one of those fires that smolder underground for weeks, months, years... Tignor was a big battered-face moon in the night sky, you saw only the brightly lighted part, glaring like a coin, but you knew that there was another, dark and secret side. The two sides of the pockmarked moon were simultaneous yet you wanted to think, like a child, that there was only the light."

"Even as a small child he was shrewd enough to know It's like she and I have died. And now nothing can hurt us."

"The compulsion to be happy only complicates life."

"As your life isn't a real life any longer only something you do with your time."

"She knew what music cues signaled even when she wasn't watching the screen. It gave you a confused sense of what to expect in life. For in life there is no music, you have no cues. Most things happen in silence. You live your life forward and remember only backward. Nothing is relived, only just remembered and that incompletely. And life isn't simple like a movie story, there is too much to remember.
'And all that you forget, it's gone as if it has never been. Instead of crying you might as well laugh.'
And Hazel laughed, a thin anxious girl's laugh that ceased as abruptly as it began."

"The deepest truth of the American soul is that it is shallow as a comic strip is shallow..."

"Like most women she wished to exaggerate the significance of small deaths."

"The attention of strangers was blinding, like stage lights. Except on stage you have no need to stare into the lights, you turn your attention onto the beautiful white-and-black keyboard stretching in front of you."

"There is no purpose to history as to evolution, there is no goal or progress.  Evolution is the term given to what is... History is an invention of books. In biological anthropology we note that the wish to perceive 'meaning' is one trait of our species among many. But that does not posit 'meaning' in the world. If history did exist it is a great river/cesspool into which countless small streams & tributaries flow. In one direction. Unlike sewage it cannot back up. It cannot be 'tested' --'demonstrated.' It simply is. If the individual streams dry up, the river disappears. There is no 'river-destiny.' There are merely accidents in time. The scientist notes that without sentiment or regret.
Maybe I will send you these ravings, my tenacious American cousin.
I'm drunk enough, in a festive mood!"

--The Gravedigger's Daughter, by Joyce Carol Oates.

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