Ham on rye (1982) - Charles Bukowski

But I had this feeling inside of me that something real was there. Just hardened shit, maybe, but that was more than they had.
(p. 32)


"I looked up a little girl's dress. I kicked my mother. I ate some of my snot. That's about all. Except today I baptized a dog."
"You baptized a dog ?"
I was finished. A Mortal Sin. No use going on. I got up to leave. I didn't know if the voice recommended my saying some Hail Marys or if the voice didn't say anything at all. I pulled the curtain back and there was Frank waiting.
(p. 82)


Why did I come here ? I thought. Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse ?
(p. 203)

To the Lighthouse (1927) - Virginia Woolf

"And pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw ; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke."
(p. 73)



"When darkness fell, the stroke of the Lighthouse, which had lait itself with such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern, came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding gently as if it laid its caress and lingered stealthily and looked and came lovingly again."
(p. 151)



"He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain ; among scents, sounds ; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet ; and lights passing, and brooms tapping ; and the wash and hush of the sea, how a man had marched up and down and stopped dead, upright, over them."
(p. 192)

Coming up for air (1939) - George Orwell

Practically everything worth doing was forbidden, in theory anyway. According to Mother, everything that a boy ever wants to do was ‘dangerous’. Swimming was dangerous, climbing trees was dangerous, and so were sliding, snowballing, hanging on behind carts, using catapults and squailers, and even fishing. All animals were dangerous, except Nailer, the two cats, and Jackie the bullfinch. Every animal had its special recognized methods of attacking you. Horses bit, bats got into your hair, earwigs got into your ears, swans broke your leg with a blow of their wings, bulls tossed you, and snakes ‘stung’. All snakes stung, according to Mother, and when I quoted the penny encyclopedia to the effect that they didn’t sting but bit, she only told me not to answer back. Lizards, slow-worms, toads, frogs, and newts also stung. All insects stung, except flies and blackbeetles. Practically all kinds of food, except the food you had at meals, were either poisonous or ‘bad for you’. Raw potatoes were deadly poison, and so were mushrooms unless you bought them at the greengrocer’s. Raw gooseberries gave you colic and raw raspberries gave you a skin-rash. If you had a bath after a meal you died of cramp, if you cut yourself between the thumb and forefinger you got lockjaw, and if you washed your hands in the water eggs were boiled in you got warts. Nearly everything in the shop was poisonous, which was why Mother had put the gate in the doorway. Cowcake was poisonous, and so was chicken corn, and so were mustard seed and Karswood poultry spice. Sweets were bad for you and eating between meals was bad for you, though curiously enough there were certain kinds of eating between meals that Mother always allowed. When she was making plum jam she used to let us eat the syrupy stuff that was skimmed off the top, and we used to gorge ourselves with it till we were sick.
(pp. 52-53)


If I tot up the account, I suppose I must admit that the war did me good as well as harm. At any rate that year of reading novels was the only real education, in the sense of book-learning, that I’ve ever had. It did certain things to my mind. It gave me an attitude, a kind of questioning attitude, which I probably wouldn’t have had if I’d gone through life in a normal sensible way. But—I wonder if you can understand this—the thing that really changed me, really made an impression on me, wasn’t so much the books I read as the rotten meaninglessness of the life I was leading.
(p.126)


It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that a man’s dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don’t stop working—hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste—but he’s not capable of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again. There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts.
(p.168)

Franny and Zooey (1961) - J.D. Salinger

The rest, with very little exaggeration, was books. Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books. Tall cases lined three walls of the room, filled to and beyond capacity. The overflow had been piled in stacks on the floor. There was little space left for walking, and none whatever for pacing. A stranger with a flair for cocktail party descriptive prose might have commented that the room, at a quick glance, looked as if it had once been tenanted by two struggling twelve-year-old lawyers or researchists.
(p. 117)

The old man and the sea (1952) - Ernest Hemingway

He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride.
(p. 9)


Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and hid determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him ? No, of course not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behaviour and his great dignity.
(p. 64)

Tales of ordinary madness (1972) - Charles Bukowski

Then I began hoping the plane would lose a wing and then I'd really get to see what the faces of the stewardesses looked like.
(p. 33)



"Bukowski ! Just because I have long hair, you think I'm a girl ! My name is Paul ! We were introduced ! Don't you remember ?"
Paul's father, Harvey, was looking at me. I saw his eyes. Then I knew that he had decided that I was not such a good writer after all. Maybe even a bad writer. Well, no man can hide forever.
(p. 47)



Then I noticed the Zen master's ears in the candlelight. The candlelight shone through them as if they were made of the thinnest of toilet paper.
The Zen master had the thinnest ears of any man I had ever seen. That was what made him holy ! I had to have those ears ! For my wallet or my tomcat or my memory. Or for under the pillow.
(p. 49)



Unfortunately, the world was molested with billions of people who had nothing to do with their time except murder it and murder you.
(p. 65)



With me, the racetrack tells me quickly where I am weak and where I am strong, and it tells me how I feel that day and it tells me how much we keep changing ALL the time, and how little we know of this.
(p. 73)



Great poets die in steaming pots of shit.
(p. 79)

Trout Fishing in America (1961) - Richard Brautigan

The sun was like a huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match and said, "Here, hold this while I go get a newpaper," and put the coin in my hand, but never came back.
(p. 6)


A little ways up from the shack was an outhouse with its door flung violently open. The inside of the house was exposed like a human face and the outhouse seemed to say, "The old guy who built me crapped in here 9,745 times and he's dead now and I don't want anyone else to touch me. He was a good guy. He built me with loving care. Leave me alone. I'm a monument now to a good ass gone under. If you have to crap, go in the bushes like the deer."
(p. 7)


He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.
(p. 10)


When the hammer clicked back, the rat paused between bites and looked out of the corner of its eye. First at the pistol and then at the man. It was a kinf of friendly look as if to say, "When my mother was young she sang like Deanna Durbin."
The man pulled the trigger.
He had no sense of humor.
(p. 13)


I guess it's only reasonable that people, when they get the chance, would want to shoot some stove sitting in the woods.
(p. 62)


Then I wiped the puke off my clothes and for some strange reason suddenly it was a perfect time, there at Mushroom Springs, to wonder whatever happened to the Zoot suit.
(p. 78)


She was soon running around with a big cutthroat trout in her hands, carrying it like a harp on her way to a concert - ten minutes late with no bus in sight and no taxi either.
(p. 79)


In the summer Id' thow endless cords of wood into her basement until I was silly in the head and everything looked like wood, even clouds in the sky and cars parked on the street and cats.
(p. 82)

The Great Gatsby (1925) - Francis Scott Fitzgerald

They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening  too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase towards its close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.
(p. 19)



There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb.
(p. 45)



He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four of five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.  Precisely at that point it vanished - and I was looking at an elegant young round-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.
(p. 54)



"Now you're started on the subject," she answered with a wan smile. "Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man."
A dim background started to take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away.
"However, I don't believe it."
(p. 55)



It is invariabely saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
(p.111)


They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
(p.156)

Books v. cigarettes (1946) - George Orwell

I have also listed at their full price the books that have been given to me, and those that I have temporarily borrowed, or borrowed and kept. This is because book-giving, book-borrowing and book-stealing more or less even out.
(p.2)



Many of the people who came tu us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who "wants a book for an invalid" (a very common demand, that) and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn't remember the title or the author's name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover.
(p.8)



At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact - and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial - is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.
(p.41)



I did not question the prevailing standards, because so far as I could see there were no others. How could the rich, the strong, the elegant, the fashionable, the powerful, be in the wrong ? It was their world, and the rules they made for it must be the right ones. And yet from a very early age I was aware of the impossibility of any subjective conformity. Always at the centre of my heart the inner self seemed to be awake, pointing out the difference between the moral obligation and the pyschological fact. It was the same in all matters, wordly or otherwordly.
(p.111)



At that time I could not see beyond the moral dilemma that is presented to the weak in a world governed by the strong : Break the rules, or perish. I did not see that in that case the weak have the right to make a different set of rules for themselves; because, even if such an idea had occurred to me, there was no one in my environment who could have confirmed me in it.
(p.115)



For years I had been resolved - unconsciously at first, but consciously later on - that when once my scholarship was won I would "slack off" and cram no longer.  This resolve, by the way, was so fully carried out that between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two or three I hardly ever did a stroke of available work.
(p.116)



"Good-bye," Flip's parting smile seemed to say; "it's not worth quarelling now. You haven't made much of a success on your time at St Cyprian's, have you ? And I don't suppose you'll get on awfully well at public school either. We made a mistake, really, in wasting our time and money on you. This kind of education hasn't much to offer to a boy with your background and your outlook. Oh don't think we don't understand you ! We know all about those ideas you have at the back of your head, we know you disbelieve in everything we've taught you, and we know you aren't in the least grateful for all we've done for you. But there's no use in bringing it all up now. We arent' responsible for you any longer, and we shan't be seeing you again . Let's just admit that you're one of our failures and part without ill-feeling. And so, good-bye".
That at least was what I read into her face.
(p.117)

The War Of The Worlds (1898) - Herbert George Wells

Few people realize the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.
(p.10)


It seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with that swift fate hanging over us, men could go about their petty concerns as they did.
(p.12)


Yet this strangest of all things that ever came to earth from outer space must have fallen while I was sitting there, visible to me had I only looked up as it passed.
(p.13)


It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able to slay men so swiftly and so silently.
(p.28)


"Death !" I shouted. "Death is coming ! Death!"
(p.60)


I prayed copiously.
(p.139)

The Catcher in the Rye (1951) - J.D. Salinger

I took her dress over to the closet and hung it up for her. It was funny. It made me feel sort of sad when I hung it up. I thought of her going in a store and buying it, and nobody in the store knowing she was a prostitute and all. The salesman probably just thought she was a regular girl when she bought it. It made me feel sad as hell - I don't know why exactly.
(p.86)


 The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat on this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new partner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you'd heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way - I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.
(pp.109-110)


The whole thing was sort of funny, in a way, if you thought about it, and all of a sudden I did something I shouldn't have. I laughed. And I have one of these very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behing myself in a movie or something, I'd probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up. It made old Sally madder than ever.
(p.120)


Among other things, you'll find out that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened an even sickened by human behavior. You're by nos means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arragement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.
(p.170)

The Stupid Things We Hold On To - Ryan O'Connell

When you live in New York, everything starts to have sentimental value.
If you’re here long enough you won’t be able to walk down certain blocks because of reasons x, y, and z. You collect memories like a hoarder. Everything means something. Everything has the potential to be monumental because that’s what we were taught before we moved here. The mundane can become magic. Just like that.

The other day I was walking down First Avenue and I stopped in front of this restaurant called Tara Thai. I stopped because I was struck by this memory of myself three years ago ordering take out from there. I was 22 then and it was a hot day in the summer. One of those days where the weather sticks to your body like glue. You complain about the humidity to anyone who will listen because it’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s how you keep the days moving and into colder weather. I was wearing shorts that day and I remember feeling very aware of my body. Sweat was seeping into every crevice and I had started to resemble a melted piece of candle wax. I actually liked it though. I told everyone that I hated it, loathed the heat, couldn’t wait till fall, but a part of me secretly liked the feeling of being so naked and young and disgusting on the sidewalk.

Before I had gotten the takeout at Tara Thai, I had been watching the Tyra Banks Show with two of my friends, eating peaches and smoking pot in my studio apartment. I smoked sometimes back then because I felt obligated to. Not from my friends or from “the media” or whatever. I just felt like it was important to do things without knowing the reason why I did them. I never even liked the feeling that pot gave me but life didn’t mean as much to me then as it does now. I could delete entire days, resign myself to a horrible altered state, because it was just a day. A day just like all the others. Who cares if I waste another? I don’t feel this way anymore. In some ways, that’s good. I’m placing value in time. But a part of me still wishes I could still be that person who smoked pot for no reason on a Saturday afternoon.

I had stopped by Tara Thai to get food and bring it to my friend’s apartment. She was my best friend actually. Still is. At the time she was living in a crappy apartment on 13th and B. The one redeeming aspect of her place was that it had a courtyard, which we would spend all of our time in. Drinking so much wine, talking for hours because it was free and none of us had any money. This was three years ago. Today my best friend has a full-time job and a boyfriend who she lives with in Park Slope. She’s so happy. She wasn’t happy the summer she lived in the apartment on 13th and B. She was dating some emotionally distant boy and drinking too much. (To be fair, we all were.) Killing time till she went back to school. Killing time. Ha. Now we do anything to keep time alive. We keep it breathing. We feed it water. We would never think to kill it. Wouldn’t dare to.

Even though my best friend is happy now, part of me wishes that we could still spend those lazy days together. They’re gone before you know it. They get taken away from you when you’re sleeping, like all things you take for granted do. Today you can be lazy. You can drink wine in a courtyard and talk for hours but it feels different. Not as pure, not as good. You’re hungover the second you open your mouth and drink. Why does it feel this way? I’m still so young but nothing feels like it once did. Nothing. I didn’t know it would happen this quickly. I thought I had some time to prepare myself.
I stopped in front of Tara Thai the other day because I was reminded of how fast it can all change.
Getting take-out whilst stoned on a summer day may seem like a useless memory. It may seem so unremarkable but it wasn’t. Not to me. The restaurant is here. I’m still here. But the mood and circumstances of that day are gone forever. Wave good-bye to Tara Thai and move on. Please just move the hell on. I don’t want to have to be the one who mourns everything when everyone else has clearly forgotten. Being the ghost of some crappy thai restaurant in the East Village while everyone else is in South Brooklyn soaking lentils with their boyfriend. It’s mortifying. It’s mortifying to be the one who remembers.

Selected Short Stories (1993) - Virginia Woolf

"Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in - and that is herself."
(p21, A Society)

The Dumb Day - Brad Pike

Some days I wake up, and I am dumb. Who wrote Margot at the Wedding? What’s the word for an erection lasting longer than four hours? What’s my roommate’s boyfriend’s name? I used to know this information, but it’s floated away, drifted into the ether to join all my other lost knowledge like the name of Jabba the Hutt’s father, the color of polar bear skin, and how electricity works (if the government revealed that electricity is actually magic, I would absolutely believe them). And it’s happened so fast, happened overnight. My God, I’ve spontaneously developed late-stage Alzheimer’s. One day, I am unspeakably impossibly brilliant, and the next, my brain’s delicate mechanisms are clogged with glue and gak. It’s as if while I was sleeping, my brain rotted like meat left in the sun for too long, as if someone started it in safe mode, as if a small child has been monkeying around with the buttons and levers. Lost in a mental fog, I stare at a Comcast pamphlet for five minutes. Eye amoebas drift across my vision. Somewhere nearby, William Shatner’s voice issues from a television. I think, ‘I am so dumb right now, I can hardly summon the mental energy to keep breathing.’

I find myself standing in the dark bathroom, staring into the mirror. What if I’ve always been this way, and I just never noticed before? What if this is actually a Smart Day, and I’ve suddenly become cognizant of my lack of cognition? Maybe this is the first day of the rest of my dumb life as a dumb man, thinking dumb thoughts and writing dumb things, only dumb things. ‘Everyone’s always known you were a dummy,’ I think to myself. ‘They were just too nice to tell you.’ But I can’t be dumb; I used the word cognizant and sometimes I use semicolons. ‘Dumb people use semicolons all the time,’ I think. ‘And using “pertinacious” in a sentence only means you know a word.’ But what if I use an em dash? — ‘No.’

A friend calls me, and I’m intensely aware of how dumb I sound. It’s as if I have nothing to say for myself, like I don’t have a thought in my head. I say “yeah” a lot. Then I find myself saying “it’s fine” over and over like someone on the verge of a mental break. I say “like, you know…” and then I keep starting every sentence with the word “apparently.” ‘Say something interesting! Something witty!’ I think to myself. I say, “I feel like I’m getting dumber and less interesting the older I get.” He says, “You are. Ha! Just kidding.” There’s a long pause. I can’t think of anything else to say, and then I drop a fork on the floor. “What was that,” he asks. “I dropped a fork,” I say. “Oh.” Another long pause. “Well, I’ve gotta go,” he says.

The Dumb Day seems to stretch on and on. I forget where I set down my phone, and when I find it, I can’t remember who I wanted to call. My roommate asks me why the oven is on, and I realize I forgot to turn it off after baking mozzarella marinara chicken patties. I keep knocking over cups and boxes. I forget where I left my keys, then forget why I wanted to go out in the first place. It’s got to be brain chemistry, some random combination of foods, beverages, sleep cycles, UV light exposure, and humidity that has crippled cognitive function. Maybe if I drink coffee, chew gum, and complete a crossword, I might reverse the descent into dumbness, but I doubt it.

Disillusioned, I turn on Horizon, a science documentary series on the BBC, and suddenly, I’m not just dumb, I’m a Neanderthal, a primate when compared to a scientist constructing mathematical theories about gravitons and dark matter, a physicist working on a particle accelerator, or a neurologist who can induce creativity via radio waves. Their eyes glitter with secret knowledge held only by the supergenius, the unfathomably colossal intellect. I watch a physicist present mind blowing ideas about the make-up of the quantum world using fruit — this pear is a proton, this grape is a top quark, this squash is a graviton — and I think, ‘I am so dumb, the only way he can make me understand these concepts is via a fruit analogy.’

This happens to me about once every couple weeks — The Dumb Day, the day when my self-esteem drops to its lowest, when I realize I can’t think of anything to say to justify my existence on this planet, and I must resign myself to a life spent in a career like “cashier” or “data entry.” At least, I think it’s once every couple weeks. It’s hard to tell whether it’s a day or my whole life because my memories of the Dumb Days are so vivid, they overshadow all the days I wasn’t dumb. Oh, the horror of having a perfect eidetic memory, but only for all the times I said or did something monumentally stupid.


http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/the-dumb-day/

It chooses you (2011) - Miranda July

In my paranoid world every storekeeper thinks I'm stealing, every man thinks I'm a prostitute or a lesbian, every woman thinks I'm a lesbian or arrogant, and every child and animal sees the real me and it is evil.
(p.11)


This sometimes happens when I'm faced with actualities - it's like déjà vu, but instead of the sensation that this has happened before, I'm suffused with the awareness that this is happening for the first time, that all the other times were in my head.
(pp. 14-17)


So we said goodbye to Michael, nervously heaping on parting graces, and silently rode the elevator back down to the first floor. We stepped out onto sunny Hollywood Boulevard, a street I drive down every day. Now when I drove past this building I would always know that Michael was in there, living on Social Security benefits, enjoying life and desiring only one last thing - to transform into a woman. His conviction ignited me, I felt light and alert. Evidence of his faith in this almost-impossible challenge was everywhere : the pink blouse, the makeup littering the bathroom, the handmade dildoesque wig stand. These were not signals of defeat. This was not someone who was getting sleepy at the end of his journey ; in fact, everything he had lived through made him certain of what mattered now.
(p. 26)


It occurred to me that everyone's story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk.
(p. 35)


It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.
(p. 40)


As I left his I room I said something like "Maybe I'll see you around," as if our generation all liked to congregate at one coffee shop.
But the moment i got back in my car I knew I would never see him again, ever. It suddenly seemed obvious to me that the whole world, and especially Los Angeles, was designed to protect me from these people I was meeting. There was no law against knowing them, but it wouldn't happen. LA isn't a walking city, or a subway city, so if someone isn't in my house or my car we'll never be together, not even for a moment. And just to be absolutely sure of that, when I leave my car my iPhone escorts me, letting everyone else in the post office know that I'm not really with them, I'm with my own people, who are so hilarious that I can't help smiling to myself as I text them back.
(pp. 56-57)


At age sixty-five, an age so far past young as to be almost unfeminine, a woman had decided to photograph herself every single day. It was immediately one of my favorite works of art, all the more significant because she wasn't Sophie Calle of Tracey Emin. She knew no one would clamor for the three rooms' worth of albums ; their value was entirely self-defined. And though of course I wished I had somehow saved the albums, the performance had to end with her dying and the collection being thrown into the dumpster. It was the ending that really made you think.
(p.111)


I'm not especially terrific with numbers, so it was as if he'd just thrown some confetti in the air and called it words.
(p.120)


I’d had a similarly groundbreaking revelation twenty-five years earlier, when I was nine. The epiphany came one night, just before I fell asleep: I would make an entire city out of cereal boxes. I’d collect the boxes over months and I’d paint them, hundreds of them, stores and streets and houses and freeways, forming a whole little world that would be an accurate representation of my hometown, Berkeley (although I wasn’t totally married to the specifics yet—it might be better to make it more of an Everytown, USA, since geography wasn’t my strong suit). The city would take up the whole basement floor and I would bring special people down there, to the basement, and turn on the lights and, boom, their minds would be blown to pieces. After passionately nursing this idea for about an hour, I suddenly had another idea: No I wouldn’t. Of course I wouldn’t make an entire city out of cereal boxes in the basement. The moment I had this second thought, I knew this was the real one. But I also felt certain that the thought itself was the only thing that had stopped me, like a witch’s curse—or, no like the witch hunters, the small-minded, fearful Local Authorities.
From then on to this very moment, I had done everything I could to avoid them, but after almost three superstitious decades I'd come to realize that the Local Authorities are always there,  inside and outside, and they get most riled up when I begin to change. Each time I feel something new, the Local Authorities step in and gently encourage me to burn myself alive.
(pp.178-179)


I'd could call her right now and ask. It almost hurt, remembering that Joe and Carolyn were a part of the world, surrounded by an infinite number of simultaneous stories. I supposed this was one reason why people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn't just movies that couldn't contain the full cast of characters - it was us.
(p.216)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) - Jonathan Safran Foer

She also gave me Grandpa's camera, which I loved for two reasons. I asked why he didn't take it with him when he left her. She said, "Maybe he wanted you to have it." I said, "But I was negative-thirty years old." She said, "Still."
(p. 3)



In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots.
(p. 38)


That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.
(p. 71)


Time was passing by like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
(p. 224)


We got at the end of the line for the elevator.
I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
(p. 247)


It broke my heart into more pieces that my heart was made of.
(pas noté la page)

I am a verb - Oliver Miller

I started running yesterday, and I don’t mean started running as in I’m taking up jogging as a regular physical activity. No, I mean at one point yesterday, I wasn’t running, and then I started running, and then I stopped again. I hadn’t run in years. I was trying to catch a bus. I could see that I was missing it from blocks and blocks away. Heyf-ckthat’smybus, I thought, and then I was off and running like Superman, except that it’s the Flash who actually does all the running, but whatever.

As I said, I hadn’t run in years. Two things immediately happened. My boxer shorts wedged themselves insanely far up my ass, and I was instantly — and I mean instantly – covered in a layer of sweat and grime. The other thing that happened is that my legs, lungs, and nerve-endings all started sending desperate messages to my brain. “…Unh? What’s this?” If they could have taken on a physical form separate from my body, they would have taken the form of a frantic bystander, waving his arms at me from the side of the road. “Hey, could you stop running?” they suggested. “Because we might die if you don’t.”

They had a point. Screw exercise. Screw exercise up the ass or something. I don’t need exercise; I mean, okay, I am going to die, sure, but in the meantime, I don’t want muscles. I’ve made it to my mid-thirties and have remained skinny, and if I was a girl, I’d be into skinny neurotic guys, so I’d date me, at least. Apart from the occasional violent revenge fantasy — prompted by, say, a driver cutting me off or someone spelling “theater” as “theatre,” or someone using the word “painterly” in a sentence — apart from the occasional revenge fantasy, as I say, I have no desire to get muscles. And gyms these days all have mirrors in them; have you noticed this? You know in the novel 1984, how they have Room 101? (“…You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.”) Well, my personal Room 101 is me stuck exercising in front of a mirror; I don’t get how anyone can do that.

But, running! Running is good as an occasional activity, if not as a lifestyle. You can’t think while you’re running, and that’s good. It’s very Zen; if I can misuse the word “Zen,” which I can. …Run, run, run. Verb, verb, verb. As I ran, I was a verb. I was a verb who still ended up missing his bus, but that was okay. Running has its own momentum, and I enjoyed seeing the world becoming sped up around me. It’s so primal, running is. “…Speed is the last excitement left, the one thing we haven’t used up, still naked in its potential, the mysterious black gift that thrills the millions.” So says Don DeLillo in his novel End Zone, and he’s got a point there. And apart from the physical aches, you can’t really be unhappy when you’re running; there’s no time for it or something. You can’t be unhappy when you’re a verb.

_____

In college, I minored in Classics, which meant that I took Latin. Minoring in Classics was part of my plan to Never Get a F-cking Job, which I went pretty far with. I minored in Classics and Creative Writing and majored in English Literature. Honestly, it wasn’t really that I didn’t want a job. Until I was eighteen and went to college, I never socialized with real people at all. All I did was read old books, which ended up preparing me for a life in Victorian England, where people actually studied things like Classics. In Victorian English job interviews, if you said on your resume that you studied the Classics, they didn’t say “…What?” or, “Okay, but how does that prepare you for a career here at Wendy’s?” No, you said I studied the Classics, they gave you a secret handshake of some sort, and then they said, “Welcome to the club, old boy! Pip-pip and all of that!” And then they gave you a job and you had it until you died of consumption at age forty.

In college, I had an excellent Classics professor, who ignored the fact that I could only say three things in Latin — “Arms and the man I sing,” “Go crucify yourself,” and “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” all of which are useless in conversation.

My professor was kind of a genius, and I don’t know if you know how Latin works, but I’ll do this quickly to avoid sending you into a catatonic coma. One day, in class, she brightly announced that she had learned that all language started as a verb. “All language started as a verb!” she said, coming into the room, no introduction. She was always very bright and chipper like that.

She was a tiny woman; a tiny bird-like woman with big clothes; baggy corduroys and a huge purse that looked like a duffel bag on her. But she was always very chipper! I loved her secretly. She was the reason that I was bad at Latin. I was bad at Latin because she never should have been a teacher. She couldn’t resist anything if you asked it more than two times. During a test you’d say: “Hey Professor Hawk, what’s the genitive plural of puella again?” “…I can’t tell you that.” “C’m-ooon, Professor Hawk.” “…I really can’t.” “Just the one time, Ms. Hawk, please? The genitive plural of puella?” (long sigh) “…It’s puellarum, Oliver.” And thus I never really had to learn any Latin. Secretly I was in love with her.

But anyway, she entered the classroom one day and announced that she had figured out that all language started as a verb. “It really did!” And it’s true; she was right. …It was a brilliant idea; she should have written a book about it, but she was too shy. She should have written a book about it and become famous and appeared on talk shows. Instead, there she was, drinking burnt coffee from the teachers’ lounge and explaining it to us. A mute inglorious Milton, she was. …She told us how it worked, and here’s the part where I have to explain Latin. Latin has these things called “conjugations,” which are for verbs. English has these too. But Latin can pack a lot more information into a single word. Like for example, in English, you have to say “I have loved her.” In Latin, that’s just one word: amavi.

So our professor came in all excited, and started talking about these things called Perfect Passive Participles. Let’s explain this quickly before you fall asleep. So, the word amo means “I love.” And the word “amatus” is a Perfect Passive Participle; a different tense of that word; translated, it means “the person having been loved.”

“The person having been loved,” or, in other words, “the lover.” …Do you get it? It’s a verb that works as a noun. So, in Latin and in other ancient languages, you can say complete sentences only using verbs! “The lover loves to love.” That’s a whole sentence of only verbs. “Amatus amat amare.” It doesn’t have to be the same word, either. You can say anything with just verbs. “The refugee feared being captured by the police.” That’s still just verbs: “The-person-having-been-fleeing feared being-caught by-the-ones-having-been-policing.” …Get it?

Now, my professor said; and she always said this in a very sing-song-y voice: “No-owwwww.”
Now, this means that all language started as a verb, she said. You don’t need nouns or anything else. So everything started out as a verb, and then verbs evolved into nouns. When people first spoke to each other, they spoke only in terms of action; past action, present frozen actions, future actions.
…The whole world started out as a verb.

“No-oowww,” my professor said, “let’s start today’s lesson.”

_____

The world as a verb! …Can you see it? I could see flashes of it — momentary flashes — as my tiny professor talked. Flashes through the glass darkly that we all look through. Momentary fiery shadows on the walls of Plato’s cavern.

The world as a verb! Everything around us is alive; atoms crashing, billiard balls spinning, people f-cking, planes flying.

Everything begins as action and then solidifies into non-action. Butterflies start as butterflies, flapping around. Then they die and become crystallized, become fossilized: a butterfly becomes a rock. A butterfly becomes a piece of a mountain, static. You see a pretty girl in a bar, she’s tilting her head just right; you randomly fall in love. You go over and talk to her; the two of you meet. You talk, flirt, date, f-ck, move in together. Now your action has become a thing. You are now a lover.

Everything is a stalactite and a stalagmite. Dripping water, action and flow — building up and freezing over time, becoming a record of itself; jagged teeth in a darkened cave.

_____

…I stopped running. I had missed my bus. I wiped disgusting sweat from my forehead. I commenced retroactively panting. I had started running, I had become a runner, and now I was just a person again. …I stared at the space where the bus had formerly been. I had been so close!

…Having missed my bus, I decided to go back home. I could write an article about this, I decided. I could type it up in frozen words; words, the fossil record of life, of the things that we do and say. I got back home. I pulled out my chair. I started to write.


http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/i-am-a-verb/

On the Road (1957) - Jack Kerouac

"Dean and I sat alone in the back seat and left it up to them and talked. "Now, man, that alto man last night had IT — he held it once he found it; I've never seen a guy who could hold so long." I wanted to know what "IT" meant. "Ah well" — Dean laughed — "now you're asking me impon-de-rables — ahem! Here's a guy and everybody's there, right? Up to him to put down what's on everybody's mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it — everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT — " Dean could go no further; he was sweating telling about it."
(p. 194)


"Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there — and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen! Well now,' he mimicked, "I don't know — maybe we shouldn't get gas in that station. I read recently in National Petroffious Petroleum News that this kind of gas has a great deal of O- Octane gook in it and someone once told me it even had semi-official high-frequency cock in it, and I don't know, well I just don't feel like it anyway...' Man, you dig all this." He was poking me furiously in the ribs to understand. I tried my wildest best. Bing, bang, it was all Yes! Yes! Yes! in the back seat and the people up front were mopping their brows with fright and wishing they'd never picked us up at the travel bureau. It was only the beginning, too."
(p. 197)