[redspiritt]

Ironically, hollowness only increases the eerie quality of otherness inherent to any echo. Delay and fragmented repetition create a sense of another inhabiting a necessarily deserted place. Strange then how something so uncanny and outside of the self, even ghostly as some have suggested, can at the same time also contain a resilient comfort: the assurance that even if it is imaginary and at best the product of a wall, there is still something else out there, something to stake out in the face of nothingness.

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

[redspiritt]

Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life's hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions. To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposite of my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to despair of which I am wrongly suspected.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (40th Anniversary Edition)

[redspiritt]

But his humor was that wry, desiccated kind soldiers whisper, all their jokes subsurface, their laughter amounting to little more than a tic in the corner of the mouth, told as they wait together in their outpost, slowly realizing that help’s not going to reach them in time and come nightfall, no matter what they’ve done or what they try to say, slaughter will overrun them all. Carrion dawn for vultures.

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

[redspiritt]

And later my macabre joy sours and I’m weeping for myself, unable to find solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing "I just want to be loved,” cursing the earth and everything I have been taught: principles, distinctions, choices, morals, compromises, knowledge, unity, prayer - all of it was wrong, without any final purpose. All it came down to was: die or adapt. I imagine my own vacant face, the disembodied voice coming from its mouth: These are terrible times.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

[redspiritt]

When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing.

George Orwell, 1984

[redspiritt]

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

George Orwell, 1984

[redspiritt]

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

[redspiritt]

I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.

Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy

[redspiritt]

We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re just learning this fact, so don’t fuck with us.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

[redspiritt]

But what makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.

Chuck Palahniuk, Damned

[redspiritt]

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up. The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details. This is how we must look to god. As if everything’s just fine.

Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

[redspiritt]

I did my best to stop thinking about things, and on a whole I succeeded. Once in a while I felt a stabbing pain, from nowhere, a knife that drove into my spine, as if to remind me that nothing at all had been resolved for real, and that sooner or later I’d notice it. Really notice it.

Johan Harstad, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?

[redspiritt]

Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them. And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

[redspiritt]

I wanna be your dog, but not like this, I was Laika shut in a capsule, traveling at 6,000 kilometers an hour around the earth, dying from lack of oxygen minute by minute, gasping for air on the bathroom floor.

Johan Harstad, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?

[redspiritt]

The more friends you have, the more funerals you’ll probably have to attend. The more people there’ll be to miss when they go. The more you put yourself forward, the more stones people can throw at you. But the person who is alone disappoints only himself. Those were my thoughts.

Johan Harstad, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?

[redspiritt]

One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.

Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

[redspiritt]

Depressives kill themselves. Psychotics, rocked in the poison cradles of their own egos, want to do everyone handy a favor and take them along.

Stephen King, Misery