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"I tried to figure out who I wasn't... put the fake first person next to the true first person... I was splitting the I into false and true I's and I just wanted to see if this false I was more or less real than the true I... And of course there's no difference."
~ Kathy Acker
"One must strain off what was personal and accidental in all these impression and so reach the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth."
~ Virginia Woolf
"To resist despair, that second makes you see... To resist despair, because you can't change everything... To resist despair, in this world is what it is to be free." ~ Operation Ivy
"you do not desire to live as you are compelled to live." ~ Franz Kafka
"note. this angel, who is now become a devil, is my particular friend; we often read the bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well. i have also the bible of hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no." ~ william blake
"If my pages are as plentifully sprinkled with ‘I’s’ as was the chief ornament of Hood’s peacock, ‘who thought he had the eyes of Europe on his tail,’ I can only say, that the ‘I’s’ are essential to the story I have told. It has been my purpose to narrate, not the life of another, but that career in which I was the principal actor." ~ p.t. barnum
"I certainly am glad you like the stories because now I feel it's not bad that I like them so much. The truth is I like them better than anybody and I read them over and over and laugh and laugh, then get embarrassed when I remember I was the one who wrote them." ~ Flannery O'Connor
"death must be fertile, from this moment on, fertile, at least, as life." ~ edna st. vincent millay
"Very well; i hear; i admit, but i have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced." ~ joseph conrad
"Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream." ~ Jack Kerouac
"Make note of it: in man's heaven there are no exercises for the intellect, nothing for it to live upon. It would rot there in a year--rot and stink. Rot and stink--and at that stage become holy. A blessed thing: for only the holy can stand the joys of that bedlam." ~ Mark Twain
"This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine." ~ William Shakespeare
"Ah! but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares." ~ Joseph Conrad
"Oblivion shall own me and only death shall love me" ~ Bergman's "Through a Glass Darkly"
"If we do not at times feel nausea at contemporary horrors, we are, in a way, already dead; if we cannot occasionally laugh at contemporary absurdities, we shall in the darkness of our despair soon die" ~ James E. Miller, Jr.
"Funny had better be sad somewhere." ~ Jerry Lewis
"It is always a writer's duty to make the world better." ~ Samuel Johnson
"If you are naive, the effect will be naive. If you are perverse, the effect will be perverse, and if you are clever, the effect will be clever." ~ Plastic Bertrand
"That which appears cannot be that which really is; and therefore only that which contradicts its surface appearance can open a way along which the truth may reach us" ~ Kenneth Hamilton
"These fragments I have shored against my ruins." ~ T.S. Eliot
"You no longer don't have to not exist." ~ Kathy Acker
"Still it was a kind of language between us." ~ James Joyce
"I have heard people say we are shaped by our childhood. But which one?" ~ Jeanette Winterson
"To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied." ~ Deleuze & Guattari
"never despair. never surrender." ~ Alan Moore
"Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he never wrong?" ~ J.D. Salinger
"The future is the past as the past is the future. We shape and are shaped by the necessary horrors of them both." ~ Tom Hutchinson & Roy Pickard
"I play it through to arrive at a point where the music meets resistance--to get rid of the resistance and meet the music." ~ Inger Christensen
"We turn green and no one can kick a chlorophyll habit. One shot and you're hung for life. We are turning into plants." ~ William S. Burroughs
"Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable... new life. Past and future stopped at the beach: that was how he'd set it out. But he wanted to believe it too, the same way he loved her, past all words -- believe that no matter how bad the time, nothing was fixed, everything could be changed and she could always deny the dark sea at his back, love it away." ~ Thomas Pynchon
"God's mercy on reluctant jesters." ~ Margaret Laurence
"Don't you feel the very earth itself sinking from beneath your feet when you realize that all your solid reality as of this moment is destined to become the half-remembered dream of tomorrow?" ~ Luigi Pirandello
