1) I never had any wild crush on her, and that used to worry me about
the long-term future: I used to think - and given the way we ended,
maybe I still do - that all relationships need the kind of violent
shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you
over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and
you come to something approaching a halt, you have to look around and
see what you've got. It could be something completely different, it
could be roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be
nothing at all.
2) I was afraid because I didn't want to lose her, and we always lose
someone, or they lose us, in the end. I'd rather not take the risk.
3) You have all the basic ingredients. You're really very likeable,
when you put your mind to it. You make people laugh, when you can be
bothered, and you're kind, and when you decide you like someone then
that person feels as though she's the centre of the whole world, and
that's a very sexy feeling. It's just that most of the time you can't
be bothered.
4) Hannibal, you can leave the land of nightmare. You can be anything
that you can imagine. Come onto the bridge of dreams.
5) Temper is a useful but dangeous gift.
6) You know my hand is always on your heart.
7) My heart hops at the sight of you, who taught my heart to sing.
8) The angel intervenes in time.
9) When I said that Mercy stood
Within the borders of the wood,
I meant the lenient beast with claws
And bloody swift-dispatching jaws.
-- Lawrence Spingarn
10) "Louis, something for your client to consider. All the wars, all
the suffering and pain that happened in the centuries before his
birth, before his life, how much did that all bother him?"
"Not at all."
"Then why should anything after his life bother him? It is untroubled
sleep. The difference is he will not wake to this."
11) The death is a consequence of what I do. I believe in consequences.
12) Mischa, we take comfort in knowing there is no God. That you are
not enslaved in a Heaven, made to kiss God's ass forever. What you
have is better than Paradise. You have blessed oblivion. I miss you
every day.
13) Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary
between shit and syphilis.
14) Together we sail deathward.
15) What is left in you to love?
16) I love him and I cannot find him.
17) Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away
means forgetting.
18) You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find
your eternity in each moment.
19) If there ever comes a day when we can't be together, keep me in
your heart, I'll stay there forever.
20) 'i don't want to go among mad people.' alice remarked. 'oh, u cant
help that,' said the cat: 'we're all mad here. Im mad. You're mad.'
'how do you know im mad? Said alice. 'you must be,' said the cat, ' or
u wouldn't have come here.'
21) The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing
side.
22) Nobody ever said life was fair.
23) No glove, no love.
24) Fridays are the hardest in some ways: you're so close to freedom.
25) he acts like the world is one big, shiny present he gets to unwrap
every morning.
26) It's like a web, you know? Everything's connected.
27) It's the weirdest thing, though: as we're driving there along all
those familiar streets - streets I've known my whole life, streets so
familiar I might as well have imagined them myself - I get this
feeling like I'm floating above everything... Like everything is tiny
and insignificant. Like I'm already only remembering it.
28) Most of the time one night blends into the next, and weeks blend
into weeks, and months into other months. And sooner or later we all
die.
But at the beginning of the night anything's possible.
29) It relaxes me to think about things like that: how funny life is.
30) I wonder if you fall forever and ever and never touch down, is it
really still falling?
31) I watch three black crows take off simultaneously from a telephone
wire and wish I could take off too, move up, up, up, and watch the
ground drop away from me the way it does when you're on an airplane,
folding and compressing itself like an origami figure, until
everything is flat and brightly colored - until the whole world is
like a drawing of itself.
32) If you repeat something enough, you can almost make yourself
believe it.
33) A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you
keep your own secrets.
34) Maybe when you die time folds in on you, and you bounce around
inside this bubble forever.
35) The worst is knowing I can't tell anybody what's happening - or
what's happened - to me. Not even my mom. I guess it's been years
since I talked to her about important stuff, but I start wishing for
the days when I believed she could fix anything. It's funny, isn't it?
When you're young you just want to be older, and then later you wish
you could go back to being a kid.
36) I used to live collecting all these little facts about him,
storing them together and holding them close inside of me, like if I
gathered up all the details and remembered them... I would totally
understand him. I used to think that's what love was: knowing someone
so well he was like a part of you.
37) As I head up from the gym it strikes me how strange people are.
You can see them every day - you can think you know them - and then
you find out you hardly know them at all.
38) You can't be mean to someone forever and then feel bad when she
dies.
39) It felt so good to scream, like when you pick a scab and the blood
starts flowing again.
40) Number one rule of best friends: there are certain things that you
never, ever say.
41) Here's one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a
line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning. It's like that old
riddle about a tree falling in a forest, and whether it makes a sounds
if there's no one around to hear it.
You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every
time. That's how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth.
You'd be surprised at how easy it is to bust out of orbit, to spin out
to a place where no one can touch you. To lose yourself -to get lost.
Or maybe you wouldn't be suprised. Maybe some of you already know.
To those people I can only say: I'm sorry.
42) I guess you need to take things out on somebody.
43) I'm dead, but I can't stop living.
44) Things that aren't LIKE ME. I'm not even sure what that means; I'm
not sure how you know. I mentally try to add up all the things I've
done in my life, but no clear picture emerges, nothing that will tell
me what kind of person I am - just a lot of haziness and blurred
edges, indistinct memories of laughing and driving around. I feel like
I'm trying to take a picture into the sun: all the people in my
memores are coming back featureless and interchangeable.
45) I'm a nonperson, a shadow, a ghost. Even BEFORE the accident I'm
not sure that I was a while person - that's what I'm realizing now.
And I'm not sure where the damage begins.
46) That's a funny thing: you think, when awful things happen,
everything else just stops, like you would forget to pee and eat and
get thirsty, but it's not really true. It's like you and your body are
two separate things, like your body is betraying you, chugging on,
idiotic and animal, craving water and sandwiches and bathroom breaks
while your world falls apart.
47) That's the thing about best friends. That's what they do. They
keep you from spinning off the edge.
48) You see, I was still looking for answers then. I still wanted to
know why. As though somebody was going to answer that for me, as
though any answer would be satisfying.
Not then, but afterward, I started to think about time, and how it
keeps moving and draining and flowing forever forward, seconds into
minutes into days into years, all of it leading to the same place, a
current forever in one direction. And we're all going and swimming as
fast as we can, helping it along.
My point is: maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a
tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three
thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around in it,
let it slide like coins through your fingers. So much time you can
waste it.
But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never
really know.
49) Things change after you die, though - I guess because dying is
about the loneliest thing you can do.
50) Here are the basic two rules of running away successfully:
1. Go somewhere you know.
2. Go somewhere nobody else knows.
51) And I guess that's when it starts to hit me: the whole point is,
you do what you can.
52) You can't go home again - Thomas Wolfe
the reason you can never go home again... isn't necessarily that
PLACES change, but PEOPLE do. So nothing ever looks the same.
53) I suppose that's the secret, if you're ever wishing for things to
go back to the way they were. You just have to look up.
54) It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is
to start off down the same road you always take and wind up somewhere
new. Just one false step, one pause, one detour, and you end up with
new friends or a bad reputation or a boyfriend or a breakup. It's
never occurred to me before; I've never been able to see it. And it
makes me feel, weirdly, like maybe all of these different
possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a
thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.
55) I wonder if it's ever really possible to know the truth about
someone else, or if the best we can do is just stumble into each
other, heads down, hoping to avoid collision.
56) This is what happens when you try to help people. You get screwed.
57) and I realize this whole time I haven't been falling at all. I've
been floating.
58) So many things become beautiful when you really look.
59) Everyone can be fixed; it has to be that way, it's the only thing
that makes sense.
60) And it all seems absurd now, the chance and randomness of it. One
person shoots up and the other spirals downward - random and
meaningless. As simple as being in the right place, or the wrong
place, or however you want to look at it. As simple as getting a
craving for Diet Pepsi one day at a pool party, and getting swept
away: as simple as not saying no.
61) And kissing Kent, because that's when I realized that time doesn't
matter. That's when I realized that certain moments go on forever.
Even after they're over they still go on, even after you're dead and
buried, those moments are lasting still, backward and forward, on into
infinity. They are everything and everywhere all at once.
They are the meaning.
62) When I open my eyes he's just standing there, waiting, a little
crease in his forehead: so adorable and normal, the kind of guy who
deserves the kind of girl who wear cashmere sweaters and is really
good at crossword puzzles, or plays the violin, or volunteers at soup
kitchens. Someone nice and normal and honest... I could never be good
enough for him. Even if I lived the same day into infinity, I could
never be good enough.
63) And now I realise Lindsay's not fearless. She's terrified. She's
terrified that people will find out she's faking, bullshitting her way
through life, pretending to have everything together when really she's
just floundering like the rest of us. Lindsay, who will bite at you if
you even look in her direction the wrong way, like one if those tiny
attack dogs that are always barking and snapping in the air before
they're jerked backward on the chains that keep them in one place.
64) I'm laughing, laughing, laughing as I spin through the air
because, of course, I haven't been falling all this time.
I've been flying.
65) it occurs to me that maybe it's not so complicated at all. Most of
the time - 99 percent of the time - you just don't know how or why the
threads are looped together and that's okay. Do a good thing and
something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do
nothing and everything explodes.
66) A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has
never overcome them. - Carl Jung
67) No one ever prepares us for death. It ought to be on the school
curriculum. Instead, teachers make us learn that in a right-angled
triangle, the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the
squares on the two remaining sides. I've carried that nugget in my
head for twenty-five years and never yet had any use for it. They make
us learn how to ask the way to the town hall in French. I've go
through thirty-seven years of my life without ever needing to do this.
But they don't ever teach you how you are going to feel when someone
close to you dies. And that is going to happen to all of us. It has
happened to me, and I'm all alone here, having to work this out for
myself.
68) Soulmates are people who bring out the best in you. They are not
perfect but are always perfect for you.
69) There's this thing about friends that has always bothered me.
People have friends, it's a normal thing to have friends.
Everything I watch on television, movies, comedies, drama, all the
people have friends they can phone, chat to, visit.
How do you get friends?
Seems to me from experience that if you surf the Net for friends, all
you get is people wanting to sell you sex. I go to a pub and start
talking about people think I'm trying to pick them up.
70) I see the world my way, my mother's way. She said the world is
forever out to screw you. You have to hit back in any way you can.
Otherwise the world has won.
71) There's only so much responsibility that any human being can bear.
72) Everything had changed. The past was another country where they
did things differently. But it wasn't as simple as crossing a frontier
to move into the new country. First there was unfinished business. All
traveller had to pack before they left. Completing unfinished business
was like packing.
73) The human will to live is a strange thing, he thought. People will
do anything to stay alive, say ANTHING. Even whencall you are staying
alive for is more pain and the hope of death.
74) Confront your problems, your inadequacies, your fears, your
demons, your monsters. (italics) Don't file them away in a drawer.
(Italics)
75) I told her what Socrates said, that the greatest pain is that
which is self-inflicted.
76) It's always hard to face reality. Much easier to ignore it or to
reinvent it in a way that suits us.
77) I've been trying to explain to him that Heisenberg believed that
the very act of observing a scientific experiment changed the
behaviour of the objects under scrutiny.
78) They had shared so much together, they had been more than lovers,
more than great friends, they had been soul-mates.
79) There is no thought that we have, no action we take that is
uninfluenced by how our mind views its destiny and our body its death.
In the final analysis, our view on death shapes the answers to all the
questions life puts to us.
80) be a little more careful of love
than of anything else.
-- e.e. cummings
81) Si vas pacem, para bellum. -- Julius Caesar. (If you want peace,
be ready for war)
82) Did you have to be born evil to commit evil? Or did you have to be
born with the CAPACITY for evil? Or did something happen to you when
you were a child? Or an adult?
What was evil anyway? What was it that made it acceptable for
Christians in the Crusades to have murdered Muslims in their attempt
at world domination of their beliefs, yet unacceptable for Nazis to
have murdered Jews, blacks and the disabled?
Did you have to be sane in order to be truly evil? Sane and weak or
sane and strong?
83) Spirits hung around, people said. They hung around until the
funeral. Then they went over to the Other Side.
84) "all i can do is be me, whoever that is." bob dylan :-)
miki
