Penultimate Pre-tension

[penultimatepretension]

The seeds of love have taken hold and if we won't burn together, I'll burn alone.

- Bret Easton Ellis (The Rules Of Attraction)

[penultimatepretension]

My indecision was becoming a nuisance, as it was quite causeless and senseless in view of the firmness of my intentions.

- Vladimir Nabokov (Despair)

[penultimatepretension]

It was his home now.  But it could not be his home till he had gone out from it and returned to it.

- G.K. Chesterton (Homesick At Home)

[penultimatepretension]

You will all be caught with your diapers down! That is a promise!

I make you this promise on my mother's head! For right here, today, standing on the very head of my mother, which is now on God's Green Earth, which everybody who wasn't born in a fucking sewer ought to know and understand to the very marrow of their bones!

They will invade you in your beds! They will snap you from your hot tubs! They will pluck you right out of your fancy sports cars!

There is nowhere, absolutely nowhere, in this godforsaken valley! I'm talking about from the range of my voice right here, clear out to the goddamn Mojave Desert, and beyond that, clear out past Barstow, and everywhere else in the Valley all the way to Arizona!

None of that area will be called a safety zone! There will be no safety zone! I can guarantee you the safety zone will be eliminated, eradicated! You will all be extradited to the land of no return!

It's a navigation to nowhere! And if you think that's going to be fun, you got another thing coming!

I may be a slimebucket, but believe me, I know what the hell I'm talking about! I'm not crazy!

And don't say I didn't warn you! I warned you! I warned all of you!

- Tom Farrell (Paris, Texas)

[penultimatepretension]

Repetition is epiphany that sometimes grants the old again, as new, and sometimes grants something radically new.

- Soren Kierkegaard (Repetition)

[penultimatepretension]

You know, I used to do a number with my partner Fru-Fru.  He'd pretend that he was dead.  I'd come out and say, “Where's Fru-Fru?” “Don't you know?” the ringmaster would say.  “He's dead.” “What do you mean, dead?” I'd say.  “He has to give me back the 10 sausages I lent him last year!”  “Well, he's dead,” the ringmaster said.  “Where can I find him?” I'd say.  “Moron!  I told you he's dead!”  Well, I wouldn't give up.  I'd start to call him.  “Fru-Fru!  Fru-Fru!”  Nothing.  No answer.  “He must really be dead,” I'd say.  “If he's dead, how will I find him?  A person just can't disappear like that.  He must be somewhere. Fru-Fru!”  Then I'd get an idea.  When he worked with me, I used to call him on the trumpet.  So I began to call him on the trumpet.  I played the first notes … then I listened.  Nothing.  I tried again. It was such a beautiful song, it made you cry.  

- Federico Fellini (I Clowns)

[penultimatepretension]

Soon I fell asleep, overcome with fatigue and delight.  In dreams of unspeakable joy – of restored friendships; of revived embraces; of love which said it had never died; of faces that had vanished long ago, yet said with smiling lips that they knew nothing of the grave; of pardons implored, and granted with such bursting floods of love, that I was almost glad I had sinned – thus I passed through this wondrous twilight.  I awoke with the feeling that I had been kissed and loved to my heart’s content; and found that my boat was floating motionless by the grassy shore of a little island.

- George MacDonald (Phantastes)

[penultimatepretension]

I want to think myself back into that time.

- Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet On The Western Front)

[penultimatepretension]

I’m still alive, but I feel myself dying, person by person by person by person.

- Chuck Klosterman (Killing Yourself To Live: 85% Of A True Story)

[penultimatepretension]

“Crisis is defined (Webster) as a turning point in the course of anything; as a decisive or a crucial time, stage, or event; a crucial situation whose outcome decides whether or not bad consequences will follow.  Caplan has defined crisis earlier as a time when a person faces an obstacle to important life goals that is for a time insurmountable through the use of customary methods of problem-solving.  He stated that is a period of disorganization followed by a period of upset during which many different abortive attempts at solution may be made.  Eventually, some kind of adaptation is achieved which may or may not be in the interest of that person and his fellows.”

- From (Essays In Self-Destruction)

[penultimatepretension]

There is silent and long-suffering sorrow to be met with among the peasantry. It withdraws into itself and is still. But there is a grief that breaks out, and from that minute it bursts into tears and finds vent in wailing. This is particularly common with women. But it is no lighter a grief than the silent. Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to reopen the wound.

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)  

[penultimatepretension]

Were blessings so unexpected ever, beyond a certain point, anything but traps?

- Henry James (The Sense of the Past)

[penultimatepretension]

Caution makes love at first sight impossible.

- Stendhal (On Love)

[penultimatepretension]

I am but a bird of passage that lights on the boughs of different nationalities.  I belong to no flock; I build no nest; today I am here, tomorrow on the wind.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes (A Mortal Antipathy)

[penultimatepretension]

Knot by knot, he loosened himself from us, point by point he gave up the ties joining him to the human community.

- Bruno Schulz (The Street Of Crocodiles)

[penultimatepretension]

"What can this country be,” they said to each other, “which is unknown to the rest of the world and where all nature is so different from ours? Perhaps it is the country where everything is for the best; for there must be one country of that sort."

- Voltaire (Candide)

[penultimatepretension]

In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared. We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.

- Alan Lightman (Einstein's Dreams)