and claim the beach and all concessions in the name of the suntan slaves

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have."
--Emile Chartier


"Today Is the Piano's Birthday"
Today is the piano's birthday. Yesterday it was found weeping in the garden. Mother was not there, father was gone. But today is the piano's birthday...

Under the balalaika tree the children touch it. The piano's first pedals hum.

Hurrah! shout the children. The piano is on holiday! They sing the birthday song. They bound up and down. They strike the exact note without looking, without looking the piano writes a song for the children...

Plinking, planking, plonk--the piano conducts the children through a small wood of ivory. The children sing with their feet. They call to mother who is dreaming on the lawn, to father who is at the office polishing his machines...

The piano falls into a dream. The children listen. From far off, birds with the faces of women enter the garden. They lie down. They call to the children. The children listen. They lean into the darkness. They decide. They curl inside the piano's birthday. The children are the size of a crotchet. The piano grows around them.

The piano is being dreamed. The children are the stories. They are listening...to mother wake on the lawn and touch the space around her...to father close the office door...
And today is the piano's birthday.

If we listen--we can hear mother call them, we can hear father enter the house, carefully. If we listen--we can hear the very first song the children sing, the very first dream the piano dreams...we can hear...mother and father touch each other with wonder...
--Michael Harlow


"Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness."
--Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms


"Vimes grinned. Funny, he thought, how I never feel really alive until someone tries to kill me. That's when you notice that the sky is blue. Actually, not very blue right now. There's big clouds up there. But I'm noticing them."
--Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms


"Now I know at last what it felt like to be in love: like a bruised pomelo, like a drowned cat, like a toothache, like a lost button, like a mop."
--Gilda Cordero-Fernando


"How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are all these gaps in speech where you just want to put a 'fuck.' I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, 'And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers.' How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies."
--Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down


"Find value in what we've been taught is worthless. Find good in what the world says is evil."
--Chuck Palahniuk


"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
--Friedrich Nietzsche


"There Is Only One of Everything"
Not a tree but the tree,
we saw, it will never exist, split by the wind and bending down
like that again. What will push out of the earth

later, making it summer, will not be
grass, leaves, repetition, there will
have to be other words. When my

eyes close language vanishes. The cat
with the divided face, half black half orange
rests in my scruffy fur coat, I drink tea,

fingers curved around the cup, impossible
to duplicate these flavors. The table
and freak plates glow softly, consuming themselves,

I look out at you and you occur
in this winter kitchen, random as trees or sentences,
entering me, fading like them, in time you will disappear

but the way you dance by yourself
on the tile floor to a worn song, flat and mournful,
so delighted, spoon waved in one hand, wisps of roughened hair

sticking up from your head, it's your surprised
body, pleasure I like. I can even say it,
though only once and it won't

last: I want this. I want
this.
--Margaret Atwood


"Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information."
--Kurt Vonnegut


"You recognize a true friend by how he lies to you."
--Alessandro Morandotti