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All I Quotes

“It’s nothing compared to happiness.” I snorted through gritted teeth. “What happiness?” “Exactly.” “Reality interrupts—” Jaw clenching, my nostrils flared as I felt a gush of blood flow. A whisper. “Life.” His blink was slow. “The mother of all bitches.” “And the beauty?” “Its absence is duly noted.” “Only to be found by those later.” Another swipe of my cheeks. “Once they’ve suffered to the point they scream for death.” “Full circle.” His hand found mine in a gentle hold. “Pain needs to be felt.”

“It's nothing fancy, I opened a jar of sauce and cooked the linguine. But there's fresh Parmesan and I even found a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon." "You found wine." Earlier he'd been thinking about microwaved Who Hash, solitude and if he was very lucky, beer. But a hot, fresh-cooked meal? Candles? Wine? And a chatty yoga-elf chef? With a body like a Las Vegas showgirl?”

“It’s now generally accepted that Mesmer was actually treating psychosomatic illness, and he profited mightily from people’s gullibility. In retrospect, his theories and practices sound ridiculous, but in truth, the story of Mesmer parallels many stories of today. It’s not so ridiculous to imagine people falling prey to products, procedures, and health claims that are brilliantly marketed. Every day we hear of some news item related to health. We are bombarded by messages about our health — good, bad, and confusingly contradictory. And we are literally mesmerized by these messages. Even the smart, educated, cautious, and skeptical consumer is mesmerized. It’s hard to separate truth from fiction, and to know the difference between what’s healthful and harmful when the information and endorsements come from “experts.”

“It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what." [I saw hate in a graveyard -- Stephen Fry, The Guardian, 5 June 2005]”

“It's obvious that at such times reading represented for me something like the center of reality; the rest seemed to me freaks of nature . . . hallucinations perhaps would be more appropriate. Since that other world was one in which I was unhappy, I didn't pay it much heed. It was this kind of thinking that was responsible for my idealistic bent. It stems from my conviction that reality can be learned from words, and I remained convinced for at least thirty years that a book offered you a kind of truth, a truth difficult to seize, even a metaphysical truth, and that it revealed secrets about various things. I remember that when I was seventeen or so I read Dostoevsky, and I had the distinct impression that he was offering me a secret. I wasn't quite sure what it was, but a secret nonetheless that transcended not only ordinary knowledge but also scientific knowledge, something slightly mysterious. And that kind of thinking remained with me for a long time, until finally I realized that literature was only one more human activity among many others, and as such it did not reveal any secret: what it does is no more or no less than record the full scope of how a particular period in history views the world and its people. But it took me a long time to see that. And at the time I'm referring to—when I was fifteen or so, and then later on during my last year before the baccalaureate—I was in the process of contracting what I was later to call my neurosis, that is, the notion that since reality had been given to me through books, I would make contact with reality, and offer a more profound truth about the world, if I wrote books myself. The idea was the discovery, the thing one reveals, and it certainly derived from all the elements I have just mentioned.”

“It’s odd how one’s memories of youth turn out so bleak. Why does the business of growing up—one’s recollections of growth itself—have to be so tragic? I still haven’t found the answer. I doubt if anybody has. When I finally reach that stage at which the placid wisdom of old age... occasionally descends on a person, then I too may suddenly discover that I understand. But I doubt whether, by that time, understanding will have much point.”

“It's odd how we prioritize the things the things that matter to us. We choose a career or job; we choose a city or place to live. We make so many things important to us, but in all the things we factor in as we craft our futures, we make the people in our lives a commodity of, at best, secondary importance. We would take a job and give up our people rather than choose a tribe and give up the job.”

“It’s odd how we use some words even when they’re not accurate. We try our best to make words right here; they’re important. They show you care and you understand. Take for example: ‘walking across this room towards her’. I’m walking it, while some other people here wheel or crawl. So if I was talking about all us Wrecklings, I’d just say ‘moving’ instead. Cap’n says words are mighty. That they’re sometimes used by powerful people to make other people appear weaker, even when they’re the ones with lionhearts. Cap’n can be a pain about many things, but I think he’s right about that.”

“It’s odd,” the Warrior of the Light says to himself. “I have met so many people who, at the first opportunity, try to show their very worst qualities. They hide their inner strength behind aggression and hide their fear of loneliness behind an air of independence. They do not believe in their own abilities, but are constantly trumpeting their virtues.” A warrior reads these messages in many of the men and women he meets. He is never taken in by appearances and makes a point of remaining silent when people try to impress him. He uses these occasions to correct his own faults, for other people make an excellent mirror. A Warrior takes every opportunity to teach himself.”

“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza’s The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia. 281 281 - This had been one of Hal’s deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he’d come up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he’s never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense.”

“It's official,' Casteel said, watching Emil as he stopped to speak to one of the Guardians. 'I'm going to have to kill him.' My head whipped in his direction. 'What? Why?' 'I don't like the way he looks at you.' Confused, I glanced back to where Emil was walking toward the stairwell. 'How does he look at me?' His hand was a scalding brand on my hip, even through the layers of clothing. 'He looks at you like I do.' My brows lifted. 'That's not true. You look at me like...' Those heated amber eyes met mine. 'How do I look at you, Princess?' 'You look at me like...' I cleared my throat. 'Like you want to eat me.' Casteel's eyes narrowed into thin slits as his gaze return to Emil. 'Exactly, he snarled.”

“It’s often observed that individuals within the same family bear striking resemblances, passing down features such as the curve of a mouth or the hue of hair, even the warmth of a smile from one generation to the next. Curiously, though, mortals very rarely inherit the memories of their ancestors. This absence of memories makes it all too simple, at times, for one to overlook or disconnect from their heritage, as if the threads of lineage and legacy can be easily loosened by the passage of time. And the essence of one’s forgotten heritage continues to flow within each person’s veins like poison. Excerpt from The Book of Betrayal, Müneccimbaşı Sufi Chelebi’s Journals of Mystical Phenomena”