[identity profile] two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com
"Who knows how to make love stay?

"Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay.

"Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

"Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning."

--Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker


"Altruism"
What if we got outside ourselves and there
really was an outside out there, not just
our insides turned inside out? What if there
really were a you beyond me, not just
the waves off my own fire, like those waves off
the backyard grill you can see the next yard through,
though not well--just enough to know that off
to the right belongs to someone else, not you.
What if, when we said I love you, there were
a you to love as there is a yard beyond
to walk past the grill and get to? To endure
the endless walk through the self, knowing through a bond
that has no basis (for ourselves are all we know)
is altruism: not giving, but coming to know
someone is there through the wavy vision
of the self's heat, love become a decision.
--Molly Peacock


"Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music."
--Sergei Rachmaninoff


"I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing"
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it stood there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wondered how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it,
and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
solitary in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend or lover near,
I know very well I could not.
--Walt Whitman


"Saigo"
Times have changed; seppuku has not.
(I wouldn't know, I wasn't there
for the final battle. Then: it's all historiographical
from thereon out. People died and rebellions, too;
that force met this force when the sun was here
on that date, a collection of fortune and facts, but
somewhere between blood, the blade, the push,
the man who swore to acquit himself of politics,
the failure, the right time, the wrong time,
the oversights, the geographical separations,
the lingering sentiments of status,
the two prior rebellions, the last rebellion--
the man who swore to acquit himself of politics,
somewhere between blood, the blade, the push;
I imagine, kneeling in the grass, a little cranky,
a little sad, too, kneeling nostalgically in the grass,
and then the blood, the blade, the push,
a rush of blood to the ears--I wouldn't know;
personally, even generally--but the faint hum,
looking upward, where the sky is, swearing
to acquit himself at last of politics. It can't be helped.)
One can't sleep on a powder keg indefinitely.
(Eventually, arteries, dreams, revolutionaries
come down to the manipulations of the moment;
arteries, dreams, revolutionaries, powder kegs,
all things burst.)
--Jaida Jones


"Flowers"
Right now I am the flower girl.
I bring fresh flowers,
dump out the old ones, the greenish water
that smells like dirty teeth
into the bathroom sink, snip off the stem ends
with surgical scissors I borrowed
from the nursing station,
put them into a jar
I brought from home, because they don't have vases
in this hotel for the ill,
place them on the table beside my father
where he can't see them
because he won't open his eyes.

He lies flattened under the white sheet.
He says he is on a ship,
and I can see it--
the functional white walls, the minimal windows,
the little bells, the rubbery footsteps of strangers,
the whispering all around
of the air-conditioner, or else the ocean,
and he is on a ship;
he's giving us up, giving up everything
but the breath going in
and out of his diminished body;
minute by minute he's sailing slowly away,
away from us and our waving hands
that do not wave.

The women come in, two of them, in blue;
it's no use being kind, in here,
if you don't have hands like theirs--
large and capable, the hands
of plump muscular angels,
the ones that blow trumpets and lift swords.
They shift him carefully, tuck in the corners.
It hurts, but as little as possible.
Pain is their lore. The rest of us
are helpless amateurs.

A suffering you can neither cure nor enter--
there are worse things, but not many.
After a while it makes us impatient.
Can't we do anything but feel sorry?

I sit there, watching the flowers
in their pickle jar. He is asleep, or not.
I think: He looks like a turtle.
Or: He looks erased.
But somewhere in there, at the far end of the tunnel
of pain and forgetting he's trapped in
is the same father I knew before,
the one who carried the green canoe
over the portage, the painter trailing,
myself with the fishing rods, slipping
on the wet boulders and slapping flies.
That was the last time we went there.

There will be a last time for this also,
bringing cut flowers to this white room.
Sooner or later I too
will have to give everything up,
even the sorrow that comes with these flowers,
even the anger,
even the memory of how I brought them
from a garden I will no longer have by then,
and put them beside my dying father,
hoping I could still save him.
--Margaret Atwood
[identity profile] two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com
"Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver. In fact, the person who maintains absolute standards of good and evil usually is the maniac with the revolver."
--Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All


"If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it."
--Tom Robbins


"On the list of the world's greatest inventions, the mirror is surprisingly high. As invention goes, the genesis of mirrors didn't exactly require a truckload of imagination, the looking glass being merely an extension of pond-surface, made portable and refined. Yet, because it is consulted with such frequency and anticipation by the three billion souls who animate our ball of clay, consulted almost as if it were a powerful deity that can grant favors or take them away; because, whereas most matter absorbs light, the mirror returns light to the world (it arrests light but does not book it, releasing it on its own recognizance); because it also returns, however briefly and superficially, the individual identity that people are prone to surrender to the orthodoxy of the state and its stern gods; because it never fails to provide us with someone to love and someone to hate; the mirror, on the list of great inventions, is rated higher than the thermos bottle, though not quite as high as room service.

" 'I realize, sir,' said Can O' Beans to the mirror, 'that the angle of reflection is always equal to the angle of incidence, but why? Can you explain it?'

" '?ti nialpxe uoy...'

" 'And a further thing, Mr. Mirror,' the can went on: 'Since you reflect chaos and instability as objectively as you reflect order, since you reflect the novelty and variety that humankind's institutions seem designed to suppress and deny, are you not a dangerous agent of truth? I mean, I know that magicians employ you in their trickery, but isn't uncompromising realism your forte? If humans erect institutions to conceal the unruly aspects of their own minds, aren't you mirrors sort of like holes in the fortress walls? Are you not signposts pointing away from rationality and standardization? Because you chaps show it all--good and evil, beauty and ugliness, balance and disarray--with equal emphasis. Or am I making you out to be subversive when actually you're only blasé? No offense intended, sir, in either case.'

" '.esac rehtie ni, ris, dednetni...'

"Oh, it was pointless trying to hold a civil conversation with a mirror. No matter what anybody said to them, they just turned it around."
--Tom Robbins


"Beauty she would not carry like a banner, nor would she take refuge from the world in it like a hermit in a shack. Beauty would just be her everyday thing."
--Tom Robbins


"Happiness? A good wine, a good meal, and a good woman. Or a bad woman, depending on how much happiness you can handle."
--George Burns


"If you make choices based on people's judgment or reactions, then you make really boring choices."
--dubiously Heath Ledger, according to someone-in-my-school's facebook profile (it turned no google results, so I have no idea whether he really said it or whether the chick is crazy, but it made me smile. also, I felt the sole facebook profile quote I have ever enjoyed merited preservation and maybe even a really long-winded parenthetical aside.)


"In the mingle of moonlight and headlamps, neon and leaf-glow, the skyscrapers are as beautiful as a procession of Hindu saints. Bubbling, winking, and crawling with light, they seem as full of sap as the maples in the park.

"Spilling from tenements and condominiums, from boutiques and bodegas, the anxious multitudes have found a new tempo, a pace in between the windup-toy frenzy of winter and the deep-sea diver drag of the humid summer to come. Crushing Styrofoam burger cartons, condom packs, hypodermic syringes, and graffiti-spewing spray cans underfoot, they almost dance as they walk, an unconscious rite of spring in their steps, a forgotten memory of sod and seed and lamb and ring-around-the-rosy. The unfinished and unfinishable symphony to which they move is composed of salsa, rap, and funk from boom boxes, strains of Vivaldi sifting out in the silvery drizzle from fine restaurants and limousines, the sophisticated rhythms produced by Cole Porter's phantom cigarette holder tapping upon the vertebrae of tourists and businessmen in hotel lobbies throughout midtown, fey techno-rock in Sotto bars and art lofts, drum solos banged out on plastic pails and refrigerator trays by brilliant buskers, androgynous anchorpersons announcing the 'news,' a loud screeching of truck and bus wheels, an interminable red bawling of sirens, the tooting of taxis, an occasional gunshot or scream, girlish laughter, boyish boasts, barking dogs, the whine of aggressive beggars, the yowls of the unsheltered insane, and on many a street corner, the greased-lung exhortations of evangelists, ordained or self-proclaimed, warning all who pass that this could be the last April that God will ever grant, as if April were a kitten and God an angry farmer with a sack."
--Tom Robbins
[identity profile] two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com
"Once she commenced to paint, she ceased to think. That skunk corpse of guilt floated off like a hairball. Soon she was whistling and humming, dancing first on one foot and then the other. She slopped the paint on, and she dabbed it on, she knifed it on thick, and she washed it on thin, she tinted it with white and shaded it with black, she blended it into creamy textures and isolated it in singular, emphatic, commalike brush strokes. When it came to techniques, she was definitely a slut.

"On her small canvas, she recreated a section of the Crazy Mountains, the range near Livingston that they had admired earlier that day; that is to say, she recreated the mountains not as she had originally seen them but as she eventually chose to see them, for a person has not only perceptions but a will to perceive, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it--which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world itself. Those people who recognize that imagination is reality's master, we call 'sages,' and those who act upon it, we call 'artists.'

"Or 'lunatics.' "
--Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All


" 'You are an artist. You know that big picture at the museum midtown, that picture by that fellow Rousseau, it is called The Sleeping Gypsy?'

" 'Yeah. Sure. That's a very famous painting.'

" 'It ought to be called The Sleeping Arab, that picture. An Arab lies in the desert, sleeping under the crazy-faced moon. A lion sniffs at the Arab, the Arab is unafraid. The Arab dreams on. The river in the background, I think the river is the Arab's dream. Perhaps the lion is also dreamed: you notice it has left no paw prints in the sand. In any case, that picture, my dear, is the definitive portrait of the Arab character. Fierce and free, sleeping fearlessly beneath the wild night stars. But dreaming. Dreaming always of water. Dreaming of danger when real danger is absent, in order to demonstrate bravado. Arabs live in their fantasies. We are not a practical people like the Jews are. The Jews get things accomplished. The Arab dreams--and converses with the moon.' "
--Tom Robbins


"One tended to lose one's bearings in the presence of willful and persistent acts of craziness, and the more gentle the act, the crazier it seemed, as if rage and violence, being closer to the norm, were easier to accommodate.

"But was he actually crazy? Ellen Cherry was in no hurry to find out. For now, she was content with the inspiration that he provided, and the oblique solace. This, she told herself, this and not what's happening tonight at Ultima Sommerveil's gallery, or any other gallery, this lonely, uncompromising, obsessive tug-of-war with presumed reality, this is what art is all about."
--Tom Robbins


" 'The radios that pass by here play nothing but rap music. Sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.'

" 'While shoving 'em both up a guard dog's ass.' "
--Tom Robbins


"...leaving Raoul on the verge of composing one of those trite romantic lyrics that, lacking the ivory flame of great poetry, nevertheless stay with a person forever, like a scar, a tattoo, or third-grade arithmetic."
--Tom Robbins


"It was time to bathe, and she seriously considered inviting Captain Vibrator to bathe with her. 'Maybe I should wait until I know him better,' she said to the vase of roses on the breakfast table, the roses that Spike and Abu had sent. She bathed with the roses, instead. They floated in the water around her, sometimes pricking her with their tiny thorns. 'Acupuncture,' she said. 'I needed that!' Petals came loose like pages from a magazine about aphid lifestyles, only to be trapped in webs spun by spiders of soap. Ellen Cherry pasted wet rose petals on her nipples, plastered one under her nose like a comedian's mustache. 'Springtime for Hitler,' she said. Outside, it was November, and the margarita glasses of the skyscrapers were salted with frost.

"Sanitary now, and most casually attired, she wrapped the drowned roses in newspaper and laid them with the garbage. 'They wouldn't have lasted anyway,' she told herself, drying her hands on her sweatshirt. 'Not for long.' "
--Tom Robbins


"Softly, but with practiced conviction, she said, 'Art is the only place a person can win.'

" 'It may be the only place you can win. I believe we can win any damn place we try.' "
--Tom Robbins


"She smiled in such a way that down in the Bowery, on the other end of the line, he could tell that she was smiling. There are smiles that actually travel along telephone wires, although no engineer at Bell Laboratories could explain how it works.

"Boomer answered the smile. 'Folks take art too seriously. Did I say that already?' "
--Tom Robbins


"Both money and art, powdered as they are with the romance and poetry of the age, are magic. Rather, money is magic, art is magik. Money is stagecraft, sleight of hand, a bag of clever tricks. Art is a plexus of forces and influences that act upon the senses by means of practical yet permanently inexplicable secret links. Admittedly, the line between the two can be as thin as a dime. What's more, the magicians of capitalism strengthen their hold on their audience through the manipulation of artistic images."
--Tom Robbins


"What is plain is that neither money nor the love of it is the root of all evil. Evil's roots run deeper than that. Anyway, money is not a root. Money is a leaf. Trillions of leaves, actually; dense, bushy, dollar-green, obscuring the stars of reality with their false canopy. Who says that money doesn't grow on trees?

"The introduction of money, with its seductive, if largely ambiguous promises, added a fresh measure of zip to the sport of life, but the zip turned to zap when the players, stupefied by ever-shifting intangibles, began to confuse the markers with the game.

"So, even for those of us who can't personally witness Salome's dance, the fifth veil surely will fall. It will fall at the moment of our death. As we lie there, helpless beyond distraction, electricity stealing out of our brains like a con man stealing out of a sucker's neighborhood, it will occur to many of us that everything we ever did, we did for money. And at that instant, right before the stars blink off, we will, according to what else we may have learned in life, burn with an unendurable regret--or have us a good silent laugh at our own expense."
--Tom Robbins
[identity profile] two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com
"This is the room where your wisest ancestor was born, be you Christian, Arab, or Jew. The linoleum underfoot is sacred linoleum. Please remove your shoes. Quite recently, the linoleum here was restored to its original luster with the aid of a wax made from hornet fat. It scuffs easily. So never mind if there are holes in your socks.

"This is the room where your music was invented. Notice the cracked drumhead spiked to the wall, spiked to the wolfmother wallpaper above the corner sink where the wayward wife washed out her silk underpants, inspecting them in the blue seepage from the No Vacancy neon that flickered suspiciously out in the thin lizard dawn.

"What room is this? This is the room where the antler carved the pumpkin. This is the room where the gutter pipes drank the moonlight. This is the room where moss gradually silenced the treasure, rubies being the last to go. Transmissions from insect antennae were monitored in this room. It's amazing how often their broadcasts referred to the stars."
--Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All


"Just what our apartment does
When we're not around
Does not concern us"
--The Tragically Hip, "Apartment Song"


"The canning process was invented in 1809 by a French confectioner named Nicolas Appert. Oui, the simple proletarian vessel that shepherded our spam from processing plant to dinner dish emerged in Paris, birthplace of so very much genius, so very much chic. Is it inappropriate, then, that a painter, Andy Warhol, had caused the soup can to be the most recognized image in contemporary art? Is it mere coincidence that the most representative Parisian dance is called the cancan? Or that the famed French film festival is held at a place called Cannes? Yes, of course it is, but no matter: there are more tin cans in the world than there are human beings (a hundred billion new ones are manufactured each year in the U.S. alone), and they trace their beginnings not to some savage simian savanna, as do we, but to the home of Matisse and Baudelaire, of Debussy and Sarah Bernhardt; to the metropole of the muses, the City of Light.

"For all of the fizzy artistry that surrounded its birth, however, the can is sturdy, dependable. Incidences of rupture or spoilage are rare. Cans have been opened after five decades to reveal perfectly edible contents, if you fancy potted mutton. If only we could so can our innocence, our sense of wonder, our adolescent libido. Campbell's Cream of Youth, Swanson's Spring Chicken."
--Tom Robbins
[identity profile] two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com
"Money itself was incomprehensible. Almost from its inception, it had perplexed and befuddled those in whose lives it had appeared, and although they dealt with it on a daily, if not hourly, basis, and although it worked in their every thought the way that yeast worked on bread, they were no closer to understanding it than they had been in the beginning...it clouded the vision of the world, yes, you guessed it, like a veil."
--Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

"In the past, she'd embraced the suffering artist image...but in her heart she had always considered artisthood more of a privilege than a curse, and those to whom the creative life brought only misery, she now invited to go into food service. The world could always use another waitress, another fry cook."
--Tom Robbins

"As long as a population can be induced to believe in a supernatural hereafter, it can be oppressed and controlled. People will put up with all sorts of tyranny, poverty, and painful treatment if they're convinced that they'll eventually escape to some resort in the sky where lifeguards are superfluous and the pool never closes."
--Tom Robbins

"Follow your weird."
--Cory Doctorow
[identity profile] two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com
"But plans are one thing and fate another. When they coincide, success results. Yet success musn't be considered the absolute. It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate response to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure."
--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

"So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free."
--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
[identity profile] two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com
"Life is a river. Only in the most literal sense are we born on the day we leave our mother's womb. In the larger, truer sense, we are born of the past--connected to its fluidity, both genetically and experientially."
--Wally Lamb


"There was a moment during this time, when his face was on hers, cheek on cheek, brow on brow, heavy skull on skull, through soft skin and softer flesh. He thought: skulls separate people. In this one sense, I could say, they would say, I lose myself in her. But in that bone box, she thinks and thinks, as I think in mine, things the other won't hear, can't hear, though we go on like this for sixty years. What does she think I am? He had no idea. He had no idea what she was."
--A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden


"I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward."
--Stanislaw J. Lec


"You don't get to choose the heroes...The heroes choose themselves."
--Paul Levine


"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
--Voltaire


"Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway."
--Elbert Hubbard


"The graveyards are full of indispensable men."
--Charles de Gaulle


"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
--Marianne Williamson


"To defeat them, first we must understand them."
--Elie Wiesel


"Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic."
--Oscar Wilde


"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else."
--Umberto Eco


"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."
--Søren Kierkegaard


"We invent what we love, and what we fear."
--John Irving


"I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds 'round my neck."
--Emma Goldman


"Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business."
--Tom Robbins


"You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by."
--James M. Barrie


"I've been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened."
--Mark Twain


"Just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have."
--Truman Capote


"I sell souls at the side of the road. Would you like to take a number?"
--The Distillers, "Hall of Mirrors"


"Miniature"
The woman stood up in front of the table. Her sad hands
begin to cut thin slices of lemon for tea
like yellow wheels for a very small carriage
made for a child's fairytale. The young officer sitting opposite
is buried in the old armchair. He doesn't look at her.
He lights up his cigarette. His hand holding the match trembles,
throwing light on his tender chin and the teacup's handle. The clock
holds its heartbeat for a moment. Something has been postponed.
The moment has gone. It's too late now. Let's drink our tea.
Is it possible, then, for death to come in that kind of carriage?
To pass by and go away? And only this carriage to remain,
with its little yellow wheels of lemon
parked for so many years on a side street with unlit lamps,
and then a small song, a little mist, and then nothing?
--Yannis Ritsos


"I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal,
Who is so proud of being rational."
--John Wilmot, A Satyre against Mankind


"First He Looked Confused"
I could not lie anymore so I started to call my dog "God."

First he looked
confused,

then he started smiling, then he even
danced.

I kept at it: now he doesn't even
bite.

I am wondering if this
might work on
people?
--Tukarum, translated by Daniel Ladinsky


"Isolation is aloneness that feels forced upon you, like a punishment. Solitude is aloneness you choose and embrace. I think great things can come out of solitude, out of going to a place where all is quiet expect the beating of your heart."
--Jeanne Marie Laskas


"A caterpillar is letting itself down on a thread, twirling slowly like a rope artist, spiraling towards his chest. It's a luscious, unreal green, like a gumdrop, and covered with tiny bright hairs. Watching it, he feels a sudden, inexplicable surge of tenderness and joy. Unique, he thinks. There will never be another caterpillar just like this one. There will never be another such moment of time, another such conjunction.

"These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency."
--Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
[identity profile] two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com
" 'Don't you see that it doesn't matter what activity Sissy chose? It doesn't matter what activity anyone chooses. If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic. And it doesn't matter what it is that you select, because when it has been pushed far enough it contains everything else. I'm not talking about specialization. To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else. That's not it. That's tame and insular and severely limiting. I'm talking about taking one thing, however trivial and mundane, to such extremes that you illuminate its relationship to all other things, and then taking it a little bit further--to that point of cosmic impact where it becomes all other things.'

"A flicker of comprehension lit up Dr. Goldman's heavy orbs, the way a flash of heat lightning might light up the nocturnal droppings of a well-fed mule. 'I see,' he said. 'You're referring to Gestalt--or to some far-fetched interpretation of Gestalt. Are we leading into a confrontation between Freudian and Gestalt psychology?'

" 'Gestalt schmagalt,' growled Dr. Robbins. 'What I'm referring to is magic.'
--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, pg. 241


"As a child, I was an imaginary playmate."
--Dr. Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins, pg. 244


" 'I set an example. That's all anyone can do. I'm sorry the cowgirls didn't pay better attention, but I couldn't force them to notice me. I've lived most of my entire adult life outside the law, and never have I compromised with authority. But neither have I gone out and picked fights with authority. That's stupid. They're waiting for that; they invite it; it helps keep them powerful. Authority is to be ridiculed, outwitted, and avoided. And it's fairly easy to do all three. If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, act lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid--but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the System. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself. You know that, Sissy.'

"Of course Sissy knew it. Hadn't the world's greatest hitchhiker always operated on that premise? It's just that she had a brain and our brains are forever having fun with us by making us learn over and over what we've known from the beginning. The brain may have been unjustly criticized in this book, but you've got to admit, the brain has a weird sense of humor."
--The Chink, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins, pgs. 351-352


"Late Night"
Late night and rain wakes me, a downpour,
wind thrashing in the leaves, huge
ears, huge feathers,
like some chased animal, a giant
dog or wild boar. Thunder and shivering
windows; from the tin roof
the rush of water.

I lie askew under the net,
tangled in damp cloth, salt in my hair.
When this clears there will be fireflies
and stars, brighter than anywhere,
which I could contemplate at times
of panic. Lightyears, think of it.

Screw poetry, it's you I want,
your taste, rain
on you, mouth on your skin.
--Margaret Atwood
[identity profile] two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com
"We're smugglers of authenticity and emotion. We wrap it carefully and place it in armored trucks. We unload when and where the reader least expects it."
--Chris Bachelder, "On a Difficult Sentence in Gatsby"


"We do not know what the dragon means, just as we do not know the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the image of a dragon that is congenial to man's imagination...It is, one might say, a necessary monster."
--Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, pg. xii


"I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile."
--Howard W. Campbell Jr, Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, pg. 160


" 'For eons of evolutionary time, our DNA has been whispering into the ears of our cells that we are, each one of us, the most precious things in the universe and that any action that entails the slightest risk to us may have consequences of universal importance. 'Be careful, get comfortable, don't make any waves,' whispers the DNA. Conversely, the yearning for freedom, the risky belief that there is nothing to lose and nothing to gain, is also in our DNA. But it's of much more recent evolutionary origin, according to me. It has arisen during the past couple of million years, during the rapid increase in brain size and intellectual capacity associated with our becoming human. But the desire for security, the will to survive, is of much greater antiquity. For the present, the conflicting yearnings in the DNA generate a basic paradox that in turn generates the character--nothing if not contradictory--of man. To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must give up security. Therefore, to live one must be ready to die. How's that for a paradox? But since the genetic bent for freedom is comparatively recent, it may represent an evolutionary trend. We may yet outgrow our overriding obsession to survive. That's why I encourage everyone to take chances, to court danger, to welcome anxiety, to flaunt insecurity, to rock every boat and always cut against the grain. By pushing it, goosing it along whenever possible, we may speed up the process, the process by which the need for playfulness and liberty becomes stronger than the need for comfort and security. Then that paradox that the, er, Chink sees holding the show together may lose its equilibrium. What then, Mr. Chink, what then?' Dr. Robbins scratched his mustache with the stem of his Bulova, thereby simultaneously satisfying itch and winding watch. With time the central problem facing mankind, such efficiency had to be admired."
--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, pgs. 205-206


" 'Those cowgirls are always bitching because the only radio station in the area plays nothing but polkas, but I say you can dance to anything if you really feel like dancing.' To prove it, he got up and danced to the news.

"When the music commenced again with 'The Lawrence Welk Is a Hero of the Republic Polka,' the Chink lifted Sissy by her shoulders and guided her onto his pock-marked dance floor. 'But I don't know how to polka,' she protested.

" 'Neither do I,' said the Chink. 'Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.' "
--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, pg. 217


"Bonk! went the clockworks, and then it went poing! and unlike the chimes of a regular clock, which announce, on schedule, the passing--linear and purposeful--of another hour on the inexorable march toward death, the clockworks chime came stumbling out of left field, hopping in one tennis shoe, unconcerned as to whether it was late or early, admitting to neither end nor beginning, blissfully oblivious to any notion of progression or development, winking, waving, and finally turning back upon itself and lying quiet, having issued a breathless, giddy signal in lieu of steady tick-and-tock, a signal that, decoded, said: 'Take note, dear person, of your immediate position, become for a second exactly identical of yourself, glimpse yourself removed from the fatuous habits of progress as well as from the tragic implications of destiny, and, instead, see that you are an eternal creature fixed against the wide grin of the horizon; and having experienced, thus, what it is like to be attuned to the infinite universe, return to the temporal world lightly and glad-hearted, knowing that all the art and science of the twentieth century cannot prevent this clock from striking again, and in no precisioned Swiss-made mechanisms can the reality of this kind of time be surpassed. Poing!' "
--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, pg. 236


"On the right wall had been written:

"I BELIEVE IN EVERYTHING; NOTHING IS SACRED.

"And on the left wall:

"I BELIEVE IN NOTHING; EVERYTHING IS SACRED."
--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, pg. 238


" 'Growing up is a trap,' snapped Dr. Robbins. 'When they tell you to shut up, they mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat. If Sissy is immature, it means she's still growing; if she's still growing, it means she's still alive.' "
--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, pg. 240


" 'You think I'm insane?' said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him.

" 'You're still in touch. I guess that's the test.'

" 'Barely--barely.'

" 'A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany.'

" 'Finnerty shook his head. 'He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.' He nodded. 'Big, undreamed-of things--the people on the edge see them first.' "
--Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano


"Not the Moon"
What idiocy could transform the moon, that old sea-overgrown
skull seen from above, to a goddess of mercy?

You fish for the silver-light, there on the quiet lake, so clear
to see; you plunge your hands into the water and come up empty.

Don't ask questions of stones. They will rightly ignore you,
they have shoulders but no mouths, their conversation is elsewhere.

Expect nothing else from the perfect white birdbones, picked clean
in the sedge in the cup of muskeg; you are none of their business.

Fresh milk in a glass on a plastic tray, a choice of breakfast
foods; we sit at the table, discussing the theories of tragedy.

The plump pink-faced men in the metal chairs at the edge of the golf course
adding things up, sunning themselves, adding things up.

The corpse, washed and dressed, beloved meat pumped full of chemicals
and burned, if turned back into money could feed two hundred.

Voluptuousness of the newspaper; scratching your back on the bad news;
furious anger in spring sunshine, a plate of fruit on the table.

Ask of the apple, crisp heart, ask the pear or the suave banana
which necks got sucked, whose flesh got stewed, so we could love them.

The slug, a muscular jelly, slippery and luminous, dirty
eggwhite unrolling its ribbon of mucous--this too is delicious.

The oily slick, rainbow-colored, spread on the sewage
flats in the back field is beautiful also

as is the man's hand cut off at the wrist and nailed to a treetrunk,
mute and imploring, as if asking for alms, or held up in warning.

Who knows what it tells you? It does not say, beg, Have mercy,
it is too late for that. Perhaps only, I too was here once, where you are.

The star-like flower by the path, by the ferns, in the rain-
forest, whose name I did not know, and the war in the jungle--

the war in the jungle, blood on the crushed ferns, whose names I do not
know, and the star-like flower grew out of the same earth

whose name I do not know. Whose name for itself I do not know.
Or much else, except that the moon is no goddess of mercy

but shines on us each damp warm night of her full rising
as if she were, and that is why we keep asking

the wrong questions, he said, of the wrong things. The questions of things.
Ask the spider what is the name of God, she will tell you: God is a spider.

Let the other moons pray to the moon. O Goddess of Mercy,
you who are not the moon, or anything we can see clearly,

we need to know each other's names and what we are asking.
Do not be any thing. Be the light we see by.
--Margaret Atwood


"Hold ourselves together with our arms around the stereo for hours
While it sings to itself or whatever it does,
When it sings to itself of its long-lost loves
I'm getting tired, I'm forgetting why"
--The National, "Apartment Story"


"That's the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn't it? The corpse at your feet. That little inconvenience."
--Wally Lamb


"I love words. Next to vomit and maybe teeth, they are the most frequent thing to come out of my mouth."
--Ennis Chrisolm, Wigfield by Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello, and Stephen Colbert
[identity profile] two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com
"They quit trying too hard to destroy everything, to humble everything. They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle. They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful. It's all simply a matter of degree. An Earth man thinks: 'In that picture, color does not exist, really. A scientist can prove that color is only the way the cells are placed in a certain material to reflect light. Therefore, color is not really an actual part of things I happen to see.' A Martian, far cleverer, would say: 'This is a fine picture. It came from the hand and mind of a man inspired. Its idea and its color are from life. This thing is good.' "
--Spender, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, pgs. 67-68


"You'll paint, all right, sweetie-poo. You'll paint because you're under contract to paint. Moreover, you'll paint better than you've ever painted before. Nothing like a little suffering to put some backbone into art. Has she got you smoking and drinking? Good! Creativity feeds on poisons. All great artists have been depraved. Look at me! As sure as Raoul Dufy is peeing over the side of Eternity's sailboat, this little affaire is going to inspire the finest watercolors of your career. Now, tell that goddamned poodle of yours to quit whimpering and you get in there and paint!"
--The Countess, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins, pg. 87


"But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from. There's nobody here I can love, all the people I could love are dead or elsewhere. Who knows where they are or what their names are now? They might as well be nowhere, as I am for them. I too am a missing person.

"From time to time I can see their faces, against the dark, flickering like the images of saints, in old foreign cathedrals, in the light of the drafty candles; candles you would light to pray by, kneeling, your forehead against the wooden railing, hoping for an answer. I can conjure them but they are mirages only, they don't last. Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings, I can stroke myself, under the dry white sheets, in the dark, but I too am dry and white, hard, granular; it's like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice; it's like snow. There's something dead about it, something deserted. I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor."
--Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, pgs. 103-104


"I pray where I am, sitting by the window, looking out through the curtain at the empty garden. I don't even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it's an equal darkness. Or light.

"My God. Who Art in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is within.

"I wish you would tell me Your Name, the real one I mean. But You will do as well as anything.

"I wish I knew what You were up to. But whatever it is, help me to get through it, please. Though maybe it's not Your doing; I don't believe for an instant that what's going on out there is what You meant.

"I have enough daily bread, so I won't waste time on that. It isn't the main problem. The problem is getting it down without choking on it.

"Now we come to forgiveness. Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don't let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even produce a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

"I suppose I should say I forgive whoever did this, and whatever they're doing now. I'll try, but it isn't easy."
--Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, pgs. 194-195


"I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was."
--Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, pg. 263


"Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?"
--Guy Montag, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, pg. 52


"After all, when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They're Caesar's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, 'Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.' Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money, or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore."
--Faber, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, pg. 86

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