Invisible Dog

dogs drowning in existential despair (san francisco)

[invisible-dog]

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”

— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

[invisible-dog]

“It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.”

— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

[invisible-dog]

“And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears – the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?”

— Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

[invisible-dog]

“Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”

— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

[invisible-dog]

“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

[invisible-dog]

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

— Charles Bukowski

[invisible-dog]

“I set it down as a fact that if all men knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.”

— Blaise Pascal

[invisible-dog]

“She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn’t like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn’t stop, and she didn’t like that at all.”

— William Saroyan, Gaston

[invisible-dog]

“There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.”

— O. Henry, The Gift of the Magi

[invisible-dog]

“What is life without incompatible realities?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

[invisible-dog]

“He fretted that he did not know anything. He sighed, ‘I have sought the Kingdom of God a little, the Squire has sought it terribly, but we haven’t even a map, and after what I saw this afternoon, I know the Sioux are as barbarous as we are. Is it possible that nobody has ever known—that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won’t be for another thousand years?’”

— Sinclair Lewis, The God-Seeker

[invisible-dog]

“We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.”

— Lydia Maria Child

[invisible-dog]

“Fear isn’t so difficult to understand. After all, weren’t we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It’s just a different wolf.”

— Alfred Hitchcock

[invisible-dog]

“I am either lacerated or ill at ease and occasionally subject to gusts of life.”

— Roland Barthes

[invisible-dog]

“I am going to seek a great perhaps; draw the curtain, the farce is played.”

— François Rabelais

[invisible-dog]

“But there is nothing enduring in the world, and therefore even joy in the second minute is already not as acute as in the first; in the third minute it becomes still weaker and finally merges unnoticeably with the usual condition of the soul, as a circle on the water, caused by the fall of a pebble, finally merges with the smooth surface.”

— Nikolai Gogol

[invisible-dog]

“I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.

Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it’s just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.”

— Ray Bradbury, Green Shadows, White Whale