You Pretentious You

The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone

[arterialtrees]

Don DeLillo (full text here)

[youpretentiousyou]

Nobody wins finally, we are just seeking a reprieve, a moment out of the glare.

From “The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship” by Charles Bukowski (via youpretentiousyou)

[youpretentiousyou]

All those people. What are they doing? What are they thinking? 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.

From “The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship” by Charles Bukowski (via youpretentiousyou)

[youpretentiousyou]

I remember what it was like to fall in love with her. How the few years’ difference in age had seemed like a great mystery to be unraveled. She introduced me to the Ramones and Jonathan Richman and to parties that lasted for three days. To sex in semipublic places. To the idea that love and pain often go hand-inhand. I’d been naïve when I met her, an eighteen-year-old kid cocksure and maybe a little happier for it. I’d never be that person again. But now, looking at Daphne, I can see that kid reflected in her eyes.

(via youpretentiousyou)

[youpretentiousyou]

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy (via youpretentiousyou)

[youpretentiousyou]

Moore argued that the arrival of a genuine superhero would quickly and radically alter society forever. The Justice League or Avengers could not be assimilated into any recognizable world as they appeared to be in the Marvel and DC universes. Superhumans would signal the end of the human and deform history itself with the gravity of their presence.

From “Supergods” by Grant Morrison

[youpretentiousyou]

How do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice?

From “Notes from the Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[youpretentiousyou]

Even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not be reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. [...] For the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key.

From “Notes from the Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[youpretentiousyou]

If man is stupid, then who is wise?

From “Notes from the Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[youpretentiousyou]

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

From “Notes from the Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[youpretentiousyou]

The enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of one's own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could become a different man.

From “Notes from the Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[youpretentiousyou]

The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was "sublime and beautiful," the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether.

From “Notes from the Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[youpretentiousyou]

People never really go into the killer's state of mind. They only think they do - I reckon it's because they're too frightened of what they might find buried in themselves if they really got in there. Frightened they couldn't get out again. So they do it the easy way, waste their time trying to assess a killer by their own standards, it's just childish, you can't catch the moon in a butterfly net.

From “Dead Man Upright” by Derek Raymond

[youpretentiousyou]

What I have done, detective, is what we all most desire to do, each in his own way - to be beyond time, nature, people, years, women. I am a hero - and yet what's heroic about fighting your way out of a heap of shit?

From “Dead Man Upright” by Derek Raymond

[youpretentiousyou]

If they used the amount of television time they spend on smoking telling the public about the things we deal with in here they'd realise that we all might as well die of lung cancer. We're too disgusting to live.

From “Dead Man Upright” by Derek Raymond

[youpretentiousyou]

Do whatever you like in this world except damage.

From “Dead Man Upright” by Derek Raymond

[youpretentiousyou]

Everyone says my case is a nasty business, and you spoke up and said I was a total disaster. But I don't believe I am the disaster - I think I'm just a reminder that people are living in one.

From “Dead Man Upright” by Derek Raymond